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THE 



MORALS OF EVOLUTION 



■ ) v> 

Mr jf SAVAGE, 

AUTHOR OF "the RELIGION OF EVOLUTION," ETC. 



"The ground of duty rests on no ancient code, but solely on the experience of what, 
after long ages of sore testing, man has come to feel to be best for man." 

Edward Clodd. 



(o^l 1 o^' 



BOSTON. 

GEO. H. ELLIS, loi MILK STREET. 

1880. 



or 






Copyright, 1880, 
By GEORGE H. ELLIS. 



(by permission) 

TO 

HERBERT SPENCER 

AND HIS FRIEND, 

JOHN FISKE. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Is Life worth Living? 13 

IL Morality and Religion in the Past, 24 

III. The Origin of Goodness, 38 

IV. The Nature of Goodness, 50 

V. The Sense of Obligation, 69 

VI. Selfishness and Sacrifice, 83 

VII. The Relativity of Duty, . 98 

VIII. Real and Conventional Virtues and Vices, . . . 115 

IX. Morals and Knowledge, 130 

X. Rights and Duties in Matters of Opinion, . . . 146 

XL Moral Sanctions, 161 

XII. Morality and Religion in the Future, 179 



INTRODUCTION. 



Mr. Tennyson speaks of one who tried to believe in love, — 

" Though nature, red in tooth and claw, 
With ravine, shrieked against his creed." 

And he adds to the horror of the picture by pointing us through 
the mists of the past to 

"Dragons of the prime. 
Who tore eacl^other in their slime." 

And Mr. Goldwin Smith, in a recent article in the Atlaittic 
Monthly, " On the Prospect of a Moral Interregnum," supposing 
that the doctrines of evolution are going to prevail, asks anxiously^ 
" What will become of the brotherhood of man and of the very 
idea of humanity ? " As if " the brotherhood of man " v/ere not 
one of the products of evolution ! 

These cases are referred to as illustrating a wide-spread mis- 
conception as to the moral — or immoral — significaace of the 
doctrine of evolution. Its central principle is " the struggle for 
life and the survival of the fittest." It is not strange, therefore, 
that the superficial and hasty thinker should see in it only a 
brutal struggle of brutal forces, and should regard the maxim, 
* Might makes right," as its logical outcome. To such a one, the 
morals of evolution seem something that do not exist : the phrase 
strikes him as a misnomer, an absurdity. And he asks, " How 
can. you talk of morality as based on or coming out of an age-long 



6 The Morals of Evolution. 

battle, where strength always wins and tramples weakness under 
its feet ? " 

But, while it is not strange that the superficial thinker should 
entertain such ideas, it is strange that their utter superficiality 
should not be more generally perceived by those who claim to 
lead the moral thought of the world. Let us look a moment, and 
see. "The struggle for life and the survival of the fittest," — . 
what does this come to in the life of the world? Though not 
divided from each other by any hard and fast lines, — any more 
than the dawning twilight, sunrise, ' and noon are so divided, — we 
can still perceive three great stages in the general progress of life 
on earth. In the first, physical force is supreme : this is the 
time when "dragons tore each other in their slime." You may 
draw as bloody a picture of this as you please. But, if death is to 
exist at all, it is difficult to see why it is any more cruel to have it 
come in this way than any other. Those who make out a fearful 
scene of suffering simply import their nervous systems and sus- 
ceptibilities into a world where they did not exist. Would it have 
been any better, if the weakest had won, and the unfit had sur- 
vived ? 

But, as the ages pass, the developing nervous system builds a 
brain, and the world has a new king. Physical force is dethroned ; 
and thought — first as cunning, afterwards as intelligence — sits 
on the throne. Thought wins in " the struggle for life," and sur- 
vives, because it is "fit." 

But the progress does not stop here. As men live together in 
societies, a new force is born, grows slowly, and at last gains su- 
premacy. Even thought is no longer first. Love wears the crown 
and holds the sceptre, while intelligence becomes her prime minis- 
ter. The nations discover, in the stern school of experience, that 
the people which loves most, is most closely bound together, devel- 
ops most of tenderness, pity, charity, and mutual help, — that this 
people wins, is mightiest, and so the fittest to survive. The time 
has already come when the moral force is stronger than either the 



Introduction. / 

physical or the mental. This appears in the supremacy of such 
names as those of Gautama and Jesus. Their appearance and 
influence are not contradictions or reversions of the law of evolu- 
tion; nor are they in any way anomalous. They are only its 
natural results. 

Evolution, then, is no hard and cruel force : it is only the power 
and process by which, through the ages, the best is selected, pre- 
served, and transmitted. Though, as one way of looking at hu- 
man history, we may speak of 

" Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne," 
yet, when we look more deeply, we are compelled to add : — 

" Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, 
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own." 

And this is only the natural course of human history. The " God 
within the shadow " is only the power the expression of whose life 
is the evolution of the world. The poet only sums up human, 
experience, in the long-run, when he writes : — ' 

" Forever the right comes uppermost, 
And ever is justice done." 

Not lonof since I received a letter from an orthodox minister 
and old-time friend, in which he said, " If you are going to work 
out a theory of morals, taking no account of Christianity, I shall 
be interested to see what you will make of it." 

This is here quoted, to give an opportunity to notice another 
curious misconception of the working method of the philosophy 
of evolution. As though it were not of the very essence of evo- 
lution to take account of Christianity not only, but of all the past : 

" Out of the heart of nature old 
The burdens of the Bible rolled." 

And out of the same " heart of nature " has rolled the entire 
stream of human life and progress. And evolution only seeks 
after the law of it all. It recognizes Christianity, then, as a part of 



8 The Morals of Evolution. 

itself, and no more leaves it out of account than the Mississippi 
River ignores the Missouri. All the great forces and movements 
of the past are parts of one grand system of confluents, whose 
total makes up " the river of life." 

To avoid misconception, I wish to add one brief personal word. 
The twelve chapters which follow were originally Sunday morning 
addresses, spoken to my own people during the winter of 1879-80. 
They were not written, but are published from the stenographer's 
notes. 

As I conceive it, the gospel — or good news — of God is his 
word that speaks to us, through whatever medium, teaching us 
how to live. When this is learned, the dying will take care of 
itself. No pretence is made to any originality of investigation. 
No new laws of righteousness can be discovered. We only need 
to understand the old and the eternal. The present attempt, then, 
is only this, — to translate into common language for common, 
needs the best thought of the age concerning the greatest of all 
questions, character and conduct. 

I cannot forbear adding one word touching the subject of the 
first chapter, — the value of life. Since this chapter was electro- 
typed, I have found — in Scribner''s Monthly — an anecdote so 
much to the point that it must be quoted. George William 
Curtis one day asked Horace Greeley by what test he decided 
whether or not he had succeeded in any particular lecture. His 
reply was, " I think I have succeeded when more people stay iii 
than go out. ^"^ Isn't this a decisive test as to the value of life? 
The value of anything is determined always and everywhere by 
only one thing, — hiujian desire for it. That the vast majority of 
men desire life — stay in instead of going out — turns the question, 
as to whether it is worth living, into an absurdity. The desire for 
it is the ultimate fact as to its value. 

Boston, February, 1880. 



PREFATORY. 



" Conduct," says Matthew Arnold, " is at least three- 
fourths of life." It depends ultimately upon two things: 
what a man is in himself and the circumstances about him ; 
or what he may fancy, or suppose, whether rightly or 
wrongly, to be the circumstances in which he stands, — his 
relations to God, to the universe, to his fellow-men. And 
since all that man is and all that he becomes ultimately 
issues in conduct, and this conduct determines the right 
and the wrong, the happiness or the misery, the good or 
the evil of life, of course v/e are ready to say that conduct 
is the most important of all subjects that can engage our 
attention. Religion, morality, — not only these high things, 
but government, philanthropy, education, all the institu- 
tions of the world, — are ultimately manifestations of what 
man is, so that human conduct is the flower of all the 
world, — a healthful and beautiful flower or a poisonous 
and ugly one. And yet, notwithstanding the fact that 
conduct is so large a part of life, there has never been in 
the past any universal, even any general, agreement as to 
its fundamental principles, as to wherein right and wrong 
consist, as to the authority on which they rest, as to what 
they would ultimate in when wrought out into practical 
details. Just as there has never been any agreement con- 
cerning the world's religions, so there has never been any 
general agreement concerning principles of morality or 
human conduct. But now the course of human thought has 
been so largely studied, the world's past customs are so 
widely known, the principles and laws of the external uni- 



lO The Morals of Evohttion. 

verse and the nature of human society are coming to be 
so clearly comprehended, that we must believe that the time 
is not far distant, even if it has not arrived already, when 
we may be able to agree as to what right and wrong mean, as 
to where they have come from, and what they shall ulti- 
mately come to when acted out in human character. 

And there is another point that urges us on to this 
inquiry : there are thousands of people at the present time 
who have lost the fundamental reasons for their thinking 
in regard to these great questions of right and wrong, — 
persons who have been accustomed to think that right 
depended ultimately, perhaps, upon an institution called a 
church; that it depended ultimately upon some claimed 
revelation of God's will ; that it depended ultimately upon 
some intuition of the human soul ; that it depended upon 
some feeling or thing that the course of human thought 
is coming to discredit. While still a great many people are 
satisfied with Church or Book as reasons for following this 
course or that, on the other hand there are thousands and 
thousands of thoughtful, intelligent, cultivated people that no 
longer are satisfied with these reasons. They are coming to 
believe that it is at least a serious question as to whether 
there is any infallible church or any infallible book in the 
world. And if they have been taught from childhood up that 
the reason why they ought to follow this course of conduct 
rather than that, was because a church or a book says so, of 
course, now that they have come to doubt their authority, 
the reason for their character, the grandest motive of all for 
conduct to them, is gone, the foundations have crumbled, the 
moral standard is taken away. 

There are a great many people that are glad because of 
the present confusion, — persons who do not want to be tied 
to any ultimate principles of right and wrong ; who v/ish to be 
free to follow their own inclinations ; do not care to know 
the laws, because they do not wish to obey them. On the 
other hand, there are others, a great multitude, who tremble 
in view of this taking away of the foundations of things, as 



Prefatory, v ' II 

they have been accustomed to regard them, thinking that the 
world is to be deluged with evil because the old-time land- 
marks and barriers are broken down. These men tremble, 
and they are disposed, so far as these old beliefs can in any 
way bolster up human conduct and make it stronger and 
firmer, even though they have come to think them untrue, 
to do all they can to hold them up for the sake of those that 
are still influenced by them ; that is, they are in a contradictory 
attitude, — contradictory, if indeed this be a universe of truth 
and right, — thinking it is wise and safe and best to lead a 
man on to do right by the power of a delusion and a false- 
hood; that though there be no church that is infallible, 
though there be no Bible that is infallible, still it is better 
that men should believe it, that thus they may be kept from 
going into ways that are wrong. 

But believing as I do with my whole soul that the ultimate 
reasons why we ought to do this thing or that thing are not 
in book or in church or in human authority, but that they are 
grounded in the eternal and unchangeable nature of things, 
I believe that the highest welfare of men will be subserved 
when we cease to trust in delusions and dare to look God's 
great truths fairly and simply in the face. My purpose, then, 
in this course of lectures, or sermons, will be to enter upon 
the search after what are the ultimate fundamental principles 
of conduct, of right and wrong, and how they ought to be 
applied in our human lives. 



IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 



Is THIS a good world ? Is life worth living ? At first 
sight, perhaps, the question may arise in your mind as to 
what this has to do with a course of sermons on conduct, 
on right and wrong. It has everything to do : it lies as the 
foundation stone of all. For if there be no order, no law, 
no righteousness, no truth at the heart of things, if the 
essential nature of the universe in all its long unfolding be 
not righteous, if human nature be not essentially righteous, 
then the world is evil, and the very nature of virtues and 
vices is simply reversed. If it is a bad world, if it is evil in 
its nature and outcome, then those things that are conducive 
to the life, the comfort, and the welfare of man, as we say, 
become the cardinal vices of the world ; and those things 
that we have been accustomed to call cardinal virtues are 
evil and injurious. If this is a bad world and no life is 
worth living, then the sooner we have done with it the better ; 
and the highest virtue attainable for us, on this theory, 
would be suicide and murder; and the man who should 
sacrifice himself to save the life of another v/ould be com- 
mitting a piece of folly, not onl}^, but be guilty of a crime. 
Does it seem strange to you that any one should ever ask 
the question whether life is worth living ? And yet it would 
seem to be the opinion of the author of this Psalm that I 
read as our lesson this morning. He says we bring our years 
to an end as a tale that is told ; and if we live to be three- 
score and ten years old, or even fourscore, yet it is all labor 
and sorrow, — soon passes over and we are gone. And as a 
matter of fact, there are thousands, not only, there are 
millions, of people in this world to-day the very fundamental 
article of whose religious creed is that ,life is a curse, that 



14 TJie Morals of Evolution. 

the world is evil, that life is not worth living. The great 
body of Hindoos and Buddhists, outnumbering by thou- 
sands and thousands the entire body of Christendom, hold 
it and teach it as a fundamental article of their belief, 
that the highest blessedness to which they can attain is 
unconsciousness — practical non-existence. To escape the 
w^eary burden of the days and the years, and enter into the 
eternal sleep of Brahm or the rest of Nirvana, — this is the 
highest dream of their happiness, the ultimate- outcome of 
all their religious activity. 

It is no wonder that thousands of human souls, crushed 
down under the burdens of life, struggling for a bare 
existence, should come to conceive that life is a curse, a gift 
not worth having. Though they may struggle on for the 
sake of warding off a heavier lot from those that are dear 
to them, yet there are thousands that to-day no doubt lie 
down at last with a grand sense of relief, happy that they 
can go to sleep, and that no morning sun is going to awaken 
them again to pick up their burden that has chafed the 
shoulder and crushed the heart so long. But, curiously 
enough, the other class of persons that we find taking this 
ground are precisely at the opposite extreme of the social 
scale. The men that are arguing it to-day in the English re- 
views and in the American magazines, — who are they ? They 
are not the toilers and the strugglers of the world. Now and 
then they may belong to the literary class whose sympathies 
are excited by the toilers and the strugglers, and who, while 
they may believe that life is a good thing for themselves, 
seriously question whether it is a good thing for the poor 
and the weary and the worn. But the great body of them 
are the upper classes, the dilettanti, the aristocrats, the men 
w^ho live for nothing but to find a new sensation ; the men 
v/hose only search is after some new stimulus to tickle and 
thrill their nerves; the men who wake up in the morning 
asking how they shall kill the time for another day ; with no 
burden, no cares, no labor, no end or object in life excepting 
to be amused. These are the men — and no wonder — who 



Is Life Worth Living? 15 

become weary of life, and wonder whether it is worth living. 
If men like these should ask me the question as to whether 
life were worth living, I should say : " If you refer to lives 
such as these you are leading, then most certainly not." 

But the great middle class of the world, though they have 
ever so heavy burdens to bear, though they have their hours 
of weeping and weariness and loss, yet, having something 
to live for, something to care for, these men take life as a 
precious boon, and are ready to live faithfully, to the best 
of their ability, and according to their ideas. That which 
makes men weary of life is not life itself : it is some con- 
dition attached to life, it is some burden they have to carry, 
it is some obstacle in the way they have to climb, it is 
some cloud above, their heads that shuts out the sunlight of 
their peace and their joy. It is something besides life that 
makes men ask this question ; for never were truer words 
spoken than those put into musical phrase by the laureate 
of England : — 

" 'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant ; 
Oh, life, not death for which we pant, — 
More life, and fuller, that we want." 

But these men that are arguing the question would say, 
We grant that ; but it is just these very conditions of life that 
seem so inseparable from it that make us question whether 
it be not a burden that we would not care to bear. Let 
us, then, look the matter in the face, and see what kind of 
a universe this really is; see which way the balances will 
turn when we attempt impartially to weigh the good and 
the evil. 

And the first thing that strikes us as we look out over 
the world with our modern eyes is that, whatever else is 
true, this universe is a system of order, governed by law. 
And order, if you think of it, is the very first principle of 
existence, the very first principle of right, the very first prin- 
ciple — the condition — of all happiness. And it means 
more than at first may appear to you. By it we are able to 



1 6 The Morals of Evolution. 

assert that the universe is a cosmos ; not chaotic, not dis- 
ordered, a universe of law. The heavens above tell it in their 
starry speech, and the gathering of the frost on our window- 
panes, arranging itself in its beautiful crystalline orders, 
utters the same grand truth concerning the microscopic 
world. Everyw^here order, through telescope or microscope 
or spectroscope, — through whatever instrumentality, by what- 
ever means, we look out on the universe, when we come to 
understand and see we find that this is a system of magnifi- 
cent order Order, then, whatever there may be of disorder, 
is in the majority, and controls this scheme of things. 

Take one step further. The conditions of life exist in this 
universe of ours. And do you know how much that means .'' 
It means that there are more sensations of happiness in the 
universe than there are sensations of pain. For sensation 
is the very first quality and principle of life ; and always — 
those that are authorities in these matters tell us — the 
sensation of pain is the indication of a broken law, of a 
disregarded condition of life. If, then, there were more pain 
in the universe than pleasure, life itself would be extin- 
guished ; for those customs and practices and functions of 
the race, and of all races, that conduce toward the production 
and development and increase of the fulness of life, — these 
are always pleasurable sensations and emotions ; and every 
pain is a step towards death. 

Once more. The simple fact that society exists proves 
that there is more good in the world than there is evil. 
We are sometimes apt to think otherwise. We talk about 
how corrupt society is growing. The author of one of the 
Psalms exclaimed in his haste : " All men are liars." And 
modern men, echoing that idea, have been accustomed to 
say, " Every man has his price " ; and they extend it, in the 
foulness and corruption of their thought, to every woman 
too. They talk about society's degenerating, about the 
world being base all through, — totally depraved. And yet, 
I say. The simple fact that there is any society in existence 
at all is an outright, simple, flat denial of these sweeping 



Is Life Worth Living? ly 

charges against humanity. That we can live with any sort of 
comfort together as we do Uve in society, proves that there 
is more unselfishness than there is selfishness ; proves that 
the activities that go to make up the welfare of men are more 
than those activities that go to their injury and harm. If 
this were not true, there would be no society at all. 

Another thought. As we look back over the progress 
that the world has made hitherto from the earliest point 
of time that we can discover until to-day, we find that 
good has been on the increase. That is, there is more 
order, there is more happiness, more comfort, more unself- 
ishness, more devotion to the welfare of others to-day than 
there ever was in the history of the world before. The 
progress of the world, then, is from poorer to better; and 
life is becoming more and more worth living every day 
because the disabilities are being gradually outgrown and 
removed. 

And this thought should be reinforced in our minds 
by the further consideration that these things that make 
us think the world evil, a dark, hard place to live in, 
a vale of tears, — the larger part of them are not essen- 
tial in the nature of things ; they are not necessary evils. 
Humanity groans under and is burdened to-day by ten 
thousand evils that it has no right to carry. The majority 
of them are remediable evils, things that if we were only 
willing to touch with our hands and feel with our heart 
and to study with a will for truth, we could find ways of 
removing and leaving behind us in the track of the world's 
progress. Why, friends, just as there is enough sunlight 
shining for every man, woman, and child on earth ; just as 
there is enough air to breathe ; just as there are enough bird- 
songs to waken thrills of gladness in every listener on the face 
of the globe, — so there is enough of land to produce all that 
humanity needs. There is enough iron in the soil, there is 
enough coal, there are enough trees, there are enough waters : 
there is enough for every man to eat, for every man to drink. 



1 8 The Morals of EvohUiGn. 

for every man to wear. There is enough beauty to minister 
to the artistic sense of every human being ; there is enough 
truth known to inspire and lift up the Ufe of all ; there is 
enough of good to crown with beneficent blessing every 
human soul on the face of the earth. And whose fault is it, 
then, that they be not crowned ? Not the fault of God ; not 
the fault of the system of things. So far as we are able to 
see these evils and remove them, it is our fault simply and 
purely, and no one's else. Our first and highest duty, then, 
should be to study the principles of human righteousness, the 
principles of human happiness ; not to find how we can 
destroy society, not to upset it, not to overthrow it, but to 
develop it into that better and higher form where there 
shall be the largest equable distribution of all the world's 
goods, so as to satisfy all the hungry world's needs. Just 
this is what we are seeking after. It is the point that I have 
in mind, to help in the solution of some of these problems, if 
I may, in this course of sermons. 

The world, then, is worth living in. But now they come, 
representatives of some of the popular phases of modern 
thought, and tell us that science — this very science that 
I am trying as well as I can to represent — is taking out 
of life that which is best worth our living for in all its wide 
range of wealth and beauty. They say science has dis- 
credited the doctrine of immortality, and unless this be 
retained the principles of human action will be subverted; 
men will run wild into evil ; they will act on the motto, 
"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." They will 
care neither for their own welfare nor for right relations 
to their fellow-men. This is the charge that has been made 
in a recent book — that has become quite famous in these 
modern days — by Mr. Mallock, of England. He says unless 
life be supplemented by faith in the Catholic Church as 
a Divine revelation of God, an institution all-powerful and 
wise and fit to control human life, then life is a failure 
and disaster. Mr. Moody told us, when he was here in 
Boston, that infidelity was cruel ; that it came to the mother 



Is Life Worth Living? 19 

who had just lost her babe, to whisper to her a doubt as to 
whether she should ever see the little one again. Science is 
cruel because it asks questions. Mr. Moody, then, and Mr. 
M-allock, tell us, with all the emphasis of authority that they 
are capable of putting into their words, that life is not worth 
living, and that the world is a failure, unless we take their 
eternity as a supplement to the life we are living here. 

In the first place, let me remark on this point that I 
believe there is not a healthy man, woman, or child on 
earth who will not join me in saying that life is worth 
living simply for its own sake, to-day, whether there ever 
was a yesterday or ever will be a to-morrow. Have you 
ever stood, as I have, on a mountain summit, with the broad 
ocean spread out at your feet on the one side, a magnificent 
lake or bay on the other, the valley dotted with towns, with 
growing fields of greenness, or turning brown with the har- 
vest ? Have you ever looked up at the sky at night, thick 
with its stars, glorious with the moon walking in her bright- 
ness ? Have you listened to the bird-song some summer 
morning ? Have you stood by the sea and felt the breeze 
fan your weary brow, and watched the breakers curling and 
tumbling in upon the shore ? Have you looked into the 
faces of little children, seen the joy and delight that they 
experience simply in breathing and living, beheld the love- 
light in their eyes, heard their daily prattle, their laughter, 
their shouts of joy and play ? Have you, in fact, ever tasted 
what life means? Have you realized that, with a healthy 
body, in the midst of this universe you are an instrument, 
finely attuned, on which all the million fingers of the uni- 
verse do play, every nerve a chord to be touched, every 
sense thrilling with ecstasy and joy? Have you ever tasted 
what it means simply to live, — simply to open your eyes and 
look out on this wondrous world, — and have you not been 
ready to say at such a moment. This is unspeakably good t 
No matter where I came from, no matter where I am going 
to, I live an eternity in this instant of time. Is it not a mis- 



20 TJic Morals of Evohttioii. 

take, in the face of facts like these, to say that life is not 
worth living unless it is supplemented by a heaven not only, 
but, as these great authorities I have quoted also say, a hell ? 
Friends, I am ready, so far as my words may be able to 
reach, to turn the tables upon the doctrine of these men 
that is being rung through our modern world as a warning 
to frighten freethought back into the crumbling citadels 
of the old-time belief. I say that as grand, as glorious, 
as life seems to me simply for its own sake, I do not believe 
it is worth living if it is to be supplemented as these men 
say. I had rather never have been born, — though I am 
unspeakably thankful that I have been permitted to open my 
eyes upon the blue of heaven, upon the magnificence of 
mountains and seas, upon the faces of friends and little 
children ; though, I say, I am unspeakably thankful that I 
have been permitted to live if only for one hour, and though 
I feel what it means to be a man only for one hour, yet, if 
life is to be supplemented as Mr. Mallock and Mr. Moody 
say it must be to make it worth living, by their eternity, I had 
rather never have been born. Not, however, because I fear 
the future. And I fully believe, that by as much as a man 
possesses the spirit and temper of Jesus Christ, by so much 
he would rather lie down to sleep forever rather than wake 
up to find himself standing by the banks of the river of life, 
to find the golden streets and the magnificent walls of the 
New Jerusalem beneath and about him, if, as the price of all 
this, the music of heaven must have as an echo the far-oif 
discord of hell. As expressing in beautiful words this 
thought that seems to me to lie at the very heart of the 
gospel, let me read to you two or three brief verses that I 
have found, written by a Scottish doctor of divinity, — strange 
as it may seem. It is called "The Self-Exiled." 

" ' Now open the gate, and let her in, 

And fling it wide, 
For she hath been cleansed from stain of sin,' 

St. Peter cried. 
And the angels all were silent. 



Is Life Worth Living f 21 

"'Though I am cleansed from stain of sm,' 
She answered low, 
' I came not hither to enter in, 

Nor may I go.' 
And the angels all were silent. 

******** 
" ' But I may not enter there,' she said ; 
' For I must go 
Across the gulf where the guilty dead 

Lie in their woe.' 
And the angels all v/ere silent. 

*" If I enter heaven, I may not speak 

My soul's desire 
For them that are lying distraught and weak 

In flaming fire.' 
And the angels all were silent. 

" ' Should I be nearer Christ,' she said, 
* By pitying less 
The sinful living or woful dead 

In their helplessness ? ' 
And the angels all were silent. 

" ' Should I be liker Christ, were I 

To love no more 
The loved, whoin their anguish lie 

Outside the door ? ' 
And the angels all were silent. 

******** 
" ' Should I be liker, nearer Him, 
Forgetting this, — 
Singing all day with the seraphim 

In selfish bliss ? ' 
And the angels all were silent." 



Eternity, as a supplement to this present life, coupled 
with these conditions, is a thing for a brave, true, loving, 
Christ-like man to fling away. Should God open the door 
of heaven to me on this condition, I would say : No, Lord ; 
if I may not wipe away the tears, if I may not extinguish 



22 The Morals of Evolution. 

the flame, at least, if it be possible, let me sleep forever, 
that I may not know it or hear the anguish of their groans. 

Life, then, is worth living for itself alone. But we also 
cherish the magnificent hope of immortality. For, friends, 
do not be deceived by the cry that because you throw away 
the kind of eternal life that these men offer you in the 
name of God, therefore you are of necessity flinging away 
the only hope of the future. Men believed in eternal life 
before ever book was written, before ever priest elaborated 
religion. Men will believe it even if every book were blotted 
out, and every religious institution on the face of the earth 
were crumbled back to dust. It is a hope that springs from 
the human heart ; and it does not rest on the authority of 
Mr. Moody or Mr. Mallock. It rests on the intuitions and 
the hopes of the human soul. Whatever reason is good and 
sufficient for any one is good and sufficient for us. So that 
this hope as the supplement of the life we lead here still 
remains to us, whatever be our theological theories or ideas. 

And then, if, as I believe, the universe is a righteous uni- 
verse ; if it be a system of law and order and truth ; and if, 
as we know by the experience of the race thus far, good and 
peace and happiness mean the discovery of God's laws in 
the universe and obedience to them, — then, by entering 
upon the search that we begin to-day, we are doing two 
things. We are preparing intelligently, so far as we are 
concerned, to lay the foundations of the kingdom of God 
and of human welfare right here, where we are, on solid 
ground beneath our feet. And if this be a cosmos, with 
the same God, the same law, the same order, the same prin- 
ciple in all worlds, then, if there be for us another life, by 
laying the foundations of the kingdom of God here we are 
laying the foundations of the eternal city up yonder. For 
righteousness and truth and goodness and love and human 
helpfulness, — these are the things, my friends, out of which 
heaven is made. There are no better things than intelligent, 
loving appreciation of the laws of God's universe and obedi- 
ence to them. The angels can do no finer thing than that. 



Is Life Worth Living? 23 

By searching, then, most humbly, in the dust beneath our 
feet and in the stars over our head, or in the physical mem- 
bers of these bodies for the conditions of true living, — by 
searching for these laws and seeking to obey them, we are 
paving the streets of heaven, we are rearing its walls, we are 
building its homes, we are preparing for its highest service 
of joy and bliss, we are attuning our hearts and lives to 
that perfect song that shall be the echo of joy and peace 
forevermore. 



Morality and Religion in the Past. 



When a prominent Sunday-school superintendent puts on 
the market a poor or worthless quality of goods, branded 
and advertised as being the best that is to be found; or 
when a leading pew-holder or deacon in a prominent church 
turns out to be a defaulter for a large amount ; or when a 
minister of the gospel is guilty of some flagrant breach of 
the ten commandments, the whole community is shocked. 
For they say: "We expected better things of these 
men. Whoever else shall be false, these men, according 
to their profession, we demand shall be true." Did you 
ever stop to raise the question as to how it happens that 
the popular mind at the present time immediately and 
necessarily associates religion and morality, as though they 
not only belonged together now, but always had belonged 
together ? Did you ever ask yourself where this public 
sentiment, that demands character of those that claim to be 
pious, has come from ? It was not always so. The thought 
that religion and character necessarily go together is com- 
paratively a modern idea. If you go back far enough in the 
history of the world, you will come to a time when the two 
were not only separate in the theories and the thinking of 
the people, but utterly dissociated in practice. Let us take 
a few illustrations, so that you may see what I mean. 

Go far enough back into antiquity to come to the time 
when large numbers of men were fetish-worshippers ; when 
the object of their adoration, their reverence or fear, 
is a stick, or a stone, or a reptile. Of course you will 
understand in a moment that the worship of an object 



Morality and Religion in the Past. 25 

like this cannot be associated in the mind of a wor- 
shipper with any necessity for telling the truth, with any 
necessity for being pure, with any necessity for being char- 
itable and kind toward his fellows. Take another phase, 
that of the North American Indian on this continent, — 
the snake-worshippers, for example. Large tribes of them 
have believed that the serpents inhabiting that part of the 
wilderness where they found their home were in some mys- 
terious way connected with the weather on which their crops 
depended. And their principal worship has been to propi- 
tiate these gliding and subtle forces that they supposed to 
be connected with the Divine, — that they might send them 
showers, or sunshine, or whatever was needed. Of course 
you will very readily see that there could be no possible 
connection between a worship like this and what we now 
regard as moral character. Take the case of those tribes 
that have been accustomed, under the influence of relig- 
ion, to put their fathers and mothers to death after they 
had reached a certain age, doing it as a religious duty. 
You will see at once that this religion is not only inconsist- 
ent with, but contradicts and makes impossible, the very 
first principles of morality. Or, take that other type of 
religion still existing in our own time in India. See the 
mother coming with her little babe in her arms to the great 
Ganges to cast her child to the mysterious and worshipped 
monster of the river. Here again the very first principle 
of morality is contradicted by the highest duty of their 
religion. Take the Indian devotee, found by hundreds and 
thousands all over Hindostan. His highest conception of 
religion is that, by a series of fasts and penances and tort- 
ures, he shall be able to — what.? Benefit his fellow-men? 
Not at all : gain power and control over the gods. And 
they carry their idea so far that they represent the gods 
themselves, sometimes, as trembling lest these men become so 
mighty that they shall not be able to deal v/ith them. Their 
fasts were magic powers that controlled the forces of the 
heavens themselves. Or, take the worship of the sun, as it 



26 The Morals of Evolution. 

was developed among the ancient races on this continent, — 
among the Mexicans, for instance. The principal feature of 
that worship was the sacrifice ever}' year of hundreds and 
thousands of men ; and the government encouraged great 
campaigns and engaged in warfare, that they might capture 
persons enough to sacrifice to the insatiable God, that thus 
their own people might be spared. Of course you can see 
that in things like these there is no connection between 
religion and morality. 

Let us come to the highest manifestation in the Pagan 
world, — to Greece and Rome. What were the gods here 
that men worshipped ? Never in the whole history of these 
great religions, of these great peoples, until the downfall of 
Paganism before the young and rising Christianity, — never, I 
say, throughout their whole history, was morality conceived 
of as an essential part of their religious worship. The 
people did not love the gods. It never entered into their 
thought that the gods loved the people. Juno might, for 
example, take it into her head to patronize the city of Car- 
thage, and Venus might take it into her head to patronize the- 
city of Troy, and afterward Rome as the successor to Troy ; 
but it was personal conflict and jealousy between the god- 
desses more than it was regard for the people or inhabitants 
of those cities themselves. And these gods or goddesses 
engaged in conflicts among themselves just precisely as the 
politicians of Athens or Rome, and they attempted bribery 
and intimidation and every force that they could bring upon 
the people to carry out their purposes. The gods were irri- 
table, the gods were jealous, the gods were insatiable, the 
gods desired simply that their altars should smoke with sac- 
rifices, that their temples and shrines should become rich 
with offerings, that their names should be upon the lips of 
the people, that vast processions should be formed in their 
honor. They cared not a whit as to what was the character 
or moral condition of the people. The religion was simply 
an institution of ceremonies, rites, and services. A partic- 
ular form of words, for example, that a priest had used in 



Morality and Religion in the Past. 2/ 

prayer had been followed with a success in battle. It was 
immediately supposed that that special form had some 
power over the gods, and had compelled their assistance, 
and therefore it became impious to change the formula in 
the slightest degree. The hymns must always be chanted, 
not only word for word, but with precisely the same inflec- 
tions and tones of the voice. The very dresses which the 
priests used in their services were fixed and unchangeable 
from generation to generation ; the quality and shape of the 
knife used in sacrifices, the kind of altars, the color and age 
of the animals, the very kind of wood with which the sacri- 
fice must be burned. But sometimes these prayers lost their 
efficacy unless the priest at the end of it pirouetted on one 
foot in a particular way from left to right. I give these 
illustrations as showing to you in a simple, graphic way what 
religion meant to the ancient world. It had no sort of 
connection with moral character at ail. It meant simply a 
system of rites and ceremonies by which the gods were to 
be influenced, by which their wrath was to be warded off, by 
which their favor was to be v^^on. 

But these, you say, were Pagan religions. Is anything 
parallel to this true of the Hebrew or of our own t We are 
accustomed to read back into these olden times our modern 
thoughts and ideals, and to think that when Joshua or 
Jephtha used the word Jehovah he meant by it what we mean 
to-day. Nothing can be further from the truth. The He- 
brew god at the first was never conceived of as a moral being 
at all. He was originally a sun-god, — a flaming, scorching 
fire, intimately connected with the Syrian Moloch \ and the 
trace of that is still to be found in our New Testament, 
where he is spoken of as " a consuming fire." Think for a mo- 
ment of some of the characteristics that he manifested. He 
taught Jacob to steal by fraud and falsehood the birthright 
from his elder brother. This birthright depended on the 
blessing of an old and blind father ; and the people of the 
time considered this blessing so important as to suppose 
that the gods of heaven and the authorities of earth were 



28 The Morals of Evolutio7t. 

bound by it. What kind of a god was it that led Joshua 
to the conquest of Canaan, directing that he slaughter with- 
out mercy man, woman, and child of city after city ; that 
they rob and take possession of the whole country ? And 
what kind of a god was it that directed one of those old 
warriors on a certain occasion to kill all the men and all the 
married women and all the children, and distribute the maid- 
ens among the soldiery? This, you will find in your Old 
Testament, is a part of the moral or immoral character of the 
god of the Old Testament. What kind of a god is it that 
is represented in his court in heaven as seeking some way 
by which he can get Ahab to fight a battle where he is to be 
defeated ? A spirit comes into the presence of God and 
says, " Send me, and I will entice him." And God asks him 
how, and he says, " I will become a lying spirit in the mouths 
of all his prophets " ; and God says, "Go," and sends him 
forth to lie by the lips of those that claim to be his 
prophets and under his instruction ? What kind of a god 
is it into whose presence Samuel, the old prophet, comes 
with Agag, that ancient king that he had captured, and in 
the presence of the altar, as a sacrifice to Jehovah, hews 
him in pieces — as the phrase is, " before Jehovah " ? What 
kind of a god is it to whom David sacrificed the seven sons 
of Saul ? What kind of a god is it who says that David is a 
man after his own heart ? And when we search after what 
kind of a man David was, we find him to be a barbarous 
king, cruel, treacherous, false to every principle of morality 
such as we have developed in our modern times, making a 
child of murder and adultery heir to his throne and king- 
dom. What kind of a god could the people have thought 
he was, to suppose that such a man was after his own heart ? 
What kind of god is it to whom a hymn is written like that 
old psalm that was sung in the services of the people, where 
the prayer is sent up that the enemies of the writer may 
always be wanderers and vagabonds in the earth, and beg for 
their bread, and that pronounces a blessing upon those that 
take his little ones and dash their brains out upon the stones ? 



Morality and Religioji in tJie Past. 29 

Are these moral conceptions ? Is this a moral religion of 
which such things as these are a consistent part ? 

Come down to the condition of the Jews when Jesus him- 
self was born. I have read to you this morning some of the 
fiery words of his denunciation, in which he has pictured that 
time. Is the religion of Jerusalem at the time of Jesus a 
moral religion 1 Does not Jesus himself say that they have 
made the temple a den of thieves ? Does not he say that 
the Pharisees, the most religious people of the age, bound 
broad phylacteries, Scripture texts, across their foreheads, 
said long prayers, and wore wide borders on their robes, and 
stood in the market-places uttering their devotions.? that 
this was their religion, and that their practical life was a 
falsehood, was a deception, was the devouring of widows' 
houses ? This is the kind of a picture that Jesus drav/s 
for us of the Hebrew religion at its culmination at the 
time when Christianity was born. But has there been any 
divorce between religion and morality in Christianity? The 
question, as you well know, answers itself. Who was the 
model and ideal Christian in the early ages of the Church, 
and throughout the Middle Ages until modern times ? Who 
was he ? Was he a man who was honest, a man who was 
right in his relations with his fellow-men, a man who did all 
that he could to build up human society, a man who illus- 
trated the essential, fundamental principles of morality ? 
Not at all. This whole side of his character was left out of 
account. He was a man that lashed himself, a man that 
repeated so many aves, a man who said so many prayers, a 
man who fasted so many times a week, a man who devoted 
himself to the ritual and ascetic side of life, being of no use 
whatever to the world, and only being religious that he thus 
might gain power with heaven and secure his own selfish, 
felicity in another world. What was the condition of the 
Church itself at the tim.e of its mightiest power through 
Europe ? Look at the i^apacy of Alexander the Sixth, the 
infamous Borgia. Open licentiousness, open bribery, un- 
blushing murder, — these were matters of notorious occur- 



30 TJie Morals of EvoliLtioii. 

rence in Rome, and on the part of the papal family itself. 
The popes, until Alexander, had had the decency to call 
their own children nephews. Alexander unblushingly called 
them his own children, and rode out bravely equipped in 
the crowd to meet and welcome his own mistresses as they 
returned to Rome from a journey abroad. 

This was the condition of the papacy at a time when 
it ruled Europe. During these ages, — for they were the 
ages when the people were in the lowest depths of igno- 
rance and immorality, — what did the people suppose 
constituted religion, that made it the condition of recon- 
ciliation wdth God and of getting to heaven? Lucrezia 
Borgia, after a life of unblushing shame and crime of 
every kind, — when she comes to die, what does she do ? 
Simply sends a letter to the Pope, asking his blessing, and 
when the blessing comes dies peacefully, in the full expecta- 
tion of a happy immortality. That was the religion of 
Europe at this time. Look at the lives that the barons and 
noblemen led, — lives of robber}^, lives of drunkenness, lives 
of rapine, lives of perpetual warfare. What did they do 
when they came to die — repent } No. Forgive their ene- 
mies ? One of them on a certain occasion, when the con- 
fessor came to him and said, " Now before you die you must 
forgive your enemies," said: "I haven't any." And the 
confessor said : " Haven't any — a man who has lived a war- 
like life like you? " "No," he sa3^s ; "I haven't any, for I 
have killed them all." After lives like this, what did they 
suppose it necessary to do that they might enter the presence 
of God and the joy of heaven ? Simply that the consecrated 
wafer might be placed to their lips ; that they might receive 
extreme unction from the hands of the priest, — and this was 
the magic touch that opened the gate of heaven and let 
them in. 

In Europe to-day, how is it? Those countries that are 
under the power and influence of the Church to the greatest 
extent, are the countries where you find most of ignorance 
and vice. It is those countries that have been invaded by 



Morality and Religion in the Past. 3 1 

the modern spirit of science, the protest of freethought and 
earnest endeavor after truth, and the moral principles that 
underly the progress of the world, — it is these comitries 
that stand highest, and where religion itself is freest from 
those blots and blemishes that disfigure and defame it. 
Now how, friends, has this come about ? How has it hap- 
pened that, as I said, we to-day are shocked by the connect- 
ing together of religion and immorality in the same person, 
while in these olden times they were unblushingly immoral, 
and considered themselves none the less religious for that ? 
Tetzel, as he went over Europe selling indulgences, did not 
consider himself irreligious. The robber, when he came to 
offer a part of his booty at the shrine of the Church, did not 
consider that he was doing anything strange. How does it 
happen, then, that there has come this tremendous change 
over the world? How does it happen that religion and 
morality in the past have been so divergent from each other, 
and that now they are coming together? We have been 
told, friends, and are being told perpetually, that there can- 
not be any true moral life apart from the religious life of the 
time j that it all rests on the Church ; and that if you touch 
the Church, all touch the inspiration of the Bible, or touch 
Sunday, or touch any of the institutions that have come down 
as distinctively religious, you are the enemy of the morality 
of the people, and are doing what you can to overthrow the 
foundations of society. 

The principle that you are to have in mind is this : Relig- 
ion and morality were totally distinct and separate in their 
origin. At the first, they had nothing to do with each other. 
Religion was simply an arrangement between man and his 
gods, by which he v/as to gain their favor or v\^ard off their 
wrath. Morality, on the other hand, is a matter of behavior 
between man and man. The relation, as just or unjust, pure 
or impure, true or false, in which we stand to each other, — 
the manner of our life together, — that is morality. And 
religion originally, I say, was simply the means by which 
man attempted to reach and deal with this mysterious and 



32 TJie Morals of Evolution. 

mighty power outside of and above us. And you will see, 
of course, that the question as to whether a religion should 
be moral or not depended entirely upon the conception of a 
man as .to whether his god was moral or not, — purely and 
simply on that. 

On the other hand, I must call your attention to certain 
survivals of this old immoral conception of religion, still to 
be seen in the highest development of the Christian life of 
the nineteenth century. We have not yet outgrown and 
sloughed off all these evils, these excrescences that have 
attached themselves to the religious life of the ages. Only 
a little while ago we were made familiar with the fact that 
men standing very high in the Church in Scotland, — men 
who considered it wicked and wrong to infringe in the slightest 
degree the ceremonials of their religion, — men who so rever- 
enced Sunday that they would not read a Sunday paper, 
were capable of deliberately mismanaging the affairs of 
a bank, wrecking the welfare and prosperity of hundreds and 
thousands of people dependent upon them, — an utter 
breach between morality and their practical every-day life. 
We are face to face to-day with the fact that the great 
masses of the Church in England and America are not the 
ones that are leading in matters of reform ; that they are 
many and many times led to engage, and become aroused 
even to enthusiasm, in the prosecution of some vv^ar that has 
no moral principle underlying it whatever. Witness the 
condition of the English people in regard to the Zulus and 
the Afghans. Remember that Bishop Coxe, of New York, 
only a little while ago wrote a war-song to inflame the wrath 
of the people against the Turks. Mr. Gladstone has said, 
in brief words that I must read to you, something that bears 
directly on this point. He says : — 

" To my great pain and disappointment, I have found 
during the last three years that thousands of churchmen [he 
himself is a churchman] supplied the great mass of those 
who have gone lamentably wrong upon questions involving 
deeply the interests of truth, justice, and humanity. I 



Morality and Religion in the Past. 33 

should hear with much comfort any satisfactory explana- 
tion of this very painful circumstance." 

We have learned in the history of our own country, that it 
was not the religion of the time that led in such a work as 
the great anti-slavery reform. The Church was engaged in 
rivetting the fetters of the slaves and reading to them les- 
sons of pious patience from the Bible, when Mr. Garrison, 
in a hall of infidels here in Boston, uttered the first words, 
the last echo of which is their song of deliverance. And 
this grows very naturally out of the fact that religion becomes 
in a little while an institution, and men are attached to it, 
and they think it is right and covers all the right there is, or 
need be covered by anything. Of course, if it is an infallible 
revelation from God, it must include all that is necessary for 
man ; and those that believe it m.ake it the ground of their 
piety, — not only trust in it themselves, but regard as impious 
and blasphemous any attack upon it such as the assertion 
that anything more than this needs to be done. 

Now, friends, as opposed to the statement so frequently 
made, that we owe all the morality that we have in the world 
to the Church, to the religious institutions of the world, I 
wish simply to reverse that statement, however startling or 
strange it may seem, and to assert that it is the morality of 
the world that has made the religions as good as they are. 
Visit any clime, any people, any creed of civilization that 
you please in the past history of the world, and you will 
find that the religion of that people is simply the reflec- 
tion of its moral ideals. The gods in heaven speak the 
words of the people on earth. The bibles write down 
the precepts that the experience of the time has proved 
as best and good. The religious institutions take shape 
from the moral life of the time. And farther than that, 
and as confirming it all and giving it added emphasis, the 
Church, — and in that word I include every religion on the 
face of the earth, — the Church never yet started the work of 
reforming itself — never. Every grand onward movement of 
the religious life of the world has been started as a moral 



34 TJie Morals of Evolution. 

protest. Look at the condition of the religion of Israel 
when the prophets arose, — a religion of ritual and sacrifice 
and ceremony pure and simple. The prophets, — what were 
they ? Not new religionists : great moral reformers who 
demanded that the religion should be re-shaped into the 
image of their own higher ideals. And all of good and 
glorious that there is in the religion of the Hebrews to-day 
has come as the result of the work of these moral reformers, 
infusing the religious life with their own enthusiasm, and 
making it teach their own moral precepts. And when Jesus 
came, it was not to teach a new religion. I believe Jesus had 
no idea whatever of teaching a new religion. Jesus started 
out as a m.oral reformer; and the whole Sermon on the 
Mount is simply an attempt to reconstruct the old system 
and shape it after the image of his own grander moral ideas. 
And so when you come down to the history of the Church, 
the work of Savonarola, the work of Huss, the work of 
Wycliffe and his compeers in England, the work of Luther 
in Germany, the work of Calvin in Geneva, — these men 
were chiefly grand moral reformers, and they made the con- 
ceptions of the people accord with their own grander and 
better moral thoughts and intuitions. And so down to our 
own time. Channing had no idea of starting a school, of 
founding a new church. Channing was simply a moral 
reformer. And so Theodore Parker, and all the greater 
men of the time. Their whole work upon religion has 
been a work of moral reform, a moral development, a 
moral shaping and uplifting; so that the religions in the 
world to-day are as good as they are because the moral en- 
thusiasm of its prophets and preachers and teachers has 
lifted them up and shaped them after their own patterns. 

And Christianity to-day, — what does it stand on ? What 
are the foundations of Christianity in this modern civilization 
of -ours ? They are not the miracles. The miracles are 
coming to be looked at as a burden, as a thing that hinders 
modern faith. They are not the rituals and ceremonials, — ' 
none of these things. That which gives Christianity its 



Morality and Religion in the Past. 35 

power over this modern world is tiie fact tliat it is the most 
moral religion on the face of the earth. It is the religion 
that teaches most emphatically the humanities, the charities, 
the relations of justice and truth between man and man ; and 
the power of Christianity is just here. A few years ago, 
just as I was leaving the Orthodox Church, I published a 
little book setting forth the moral claims of Christianity and 
its relation to the inoral life of man. And one of the old 
professors in one of our theological seminaries in the 
country wrote me then, saying that the time was rapidly 
coming when Christianity must put this in the fore-front 
as its evidence, as the reason for its standing, for claiming 
the allegiance of the people. It is not its supernaturalism 
that carries its morality : it is the morality that floats the 
supernaturalism. Here is the power of Christianity to-day. 

Now, friends, for two or three last thoughts, very impor- 
tant, that I must yet put briefly as I can. We are told per- 
petually, — and it has become a sort of war-cry in the 
English and American magazines within the last year, — that 
there can be no morality without a belief in God and a 
belief in the future life. Let us see for a moment the bear- 
ings of that question. Bacon, the philosopher, says in one 
of his essays, that "it is better to have no opinion at all of 
God than such an opinion as is unworthy of him." And so I 
say, better to have no belief at all in God than to believe 
in a god that is below the moral level and ideal of the time. 
Whether a belief in God is a moral belief or not, depends 
entirely upon what kind of a god you believe in. The 
Mohammedan believes in God : it does not make him a 
moral man. The North American Indian believes in God : 
it does not abate one whit of his cruelty. The peo23le of 
all ages have believed in gods : it has not lifted them up 
into the image of our own beautiful morality. You had 
better, then, believe in no god at all than to believe in one 
who is unworthy of your worship and your admiration. 

Again, it is said there is no reason why a man should 
be moral unless he believes in iramortahty. Friends, 



'^i^ The Morals of EvohUioji, 

I believe that the question of morality is not necessarily- 
attached to that of the future life at all. And here 
again, whether a belief in the future life shall be a moral 
force in your character or an immoral, depends entirely 
upon what kind of future life, and upon what you regard 
as the conditions of entering into that future life. The 
Mohammedan believes in a sensual heaven of flowers, 
and ease, and lovely women. This is simply a Turkish 
harem, without death or sorrow, lifted to the skies. Is a 
belief in that kind of immortality a moral force ? The 
Indian believed in his happy hunting-grounds : it was simply 
an extension of the kind of life he was living here on earth, 
where he should still hunt, and fish, and pursue his enemies. 
Is a belief like that necessarily a moral belief ? So I say 
you had better believe in no heaven at all, in no future life 
at all, unless you believe in one worthy of the grander 
aspiration and devotion of the noblest humanity. 

Our Christianity needs still further purging and pruning 
to rid it of the survivals and excrescences of these old 
immoral conceptions of the religious life. There are still 
doctrines and beliefs and practices taught as an essential 
part of the Christianity of this nineteenth century, that are 
not simply matters of indifference, but that are definitely and 
distinctly unrighteous and immoral. Let me indicate as 
briefly as I can two or three of them. And first the old 
doctrine of the Divine Sovereignty as it was taught by 
Calvin. The doctrine that might makes right, whether it be 
in a religious creed or in the sceptre of a despot, is no less 
an immorality. The doctrine of the damnation of unbap- 
tized infants, — outgrown, you say, but still a part of the 
written fundamental law of one of the largest branches of 
Christendom ; this is distinctly and simply immoral. The 
doctrine of everlasting punishment in any form is nothing 
more nor less than an immorality. The doctrine so often 
taught, that belief is more important than life, — that a 
creed, sacrament, or ritual is more important than telling the 
truth, than paying your debts, than living kindly and nobly 



Morality arid Religion in the Past. 37 

with your reliow-men, — this doctrine is immoral. The doc- 
trine which lies at the very foundation of the churches, that 
it is more important for you to beUeve in something than it 
is to possess a character wrought into the image of God's 
own natural laws, — this is immoral. The doctrine of a 
substitutional atonement is an immorality ; and so all these, 
and others that I could name were it worth my while, are 
simply immoral survivals of the immoral religions of the past. 

I do not wish for one moment to be understood as saying 
that these old religions, even the lowest, have not had con- 
nected with them many natural virtues and sweet humanities. 
I have purposely emphasized the darker facts, so as to 
impress upon your minds the great truth that religion itself 
has not been conceived as necessarily and essentially moral. 
It is a great natural force, like the wind, or a span of mettle- 
some horses ; and the issue, good or evil, depends on whether 
intelligent morality or the opposite holds the helm, or sits on 
the box as driver. 

Let us, friends, weigh the facts so far as I have had time 
to detail them, concerning the relations in which morality 
and religion have stood, and in some degree to-day stand, to 
each other. The ideal relations, how they are intimately 
blended together, or ought to be, as one, — this will be the 
subject of a future discourse. 



THE ORIGIN OF GOODNESS. 



The fundamental problem of the old theology was the 
origin of evil. It started with the assumption of a perfect 
world in the midst of which was paradise, in \yhich paradise 
dwelt a perfect humanity. This idea naturally springs up in 
the human heart ; and two tendencies of our thinking, even 
though others contribute towards it, are sufficient to account 
for this early, wide-spread belief. In the first place, we nat- 
urally, perhaps necessarily, being what we are, idealize the 
past. Whatever may have been the troubles and trials and 
disabilities of our childhood, we forget them now that we are 
grown, and childhood is a sort of fairy-land of perfect peace 
and beauty. And then the other tendency of our thinking is 
this : Believing that God is a perfect being, the first thought 
is that he must have created at the very outset a perfect 
world ; and that evil, if it be found anywhere to exist, must 
be accounted for as something that came in afterwards, 
something thrust into the universe by an enemy from 
without. 

But this idea that the world must have been perfect at the 
beginning, if we think of it for a moment, we shall see to be 
entirely without foundation. Given eternity to work in, and 
there is no more reason that we can see in the nature of 
things why the world should have been perfect six thousand 
or ten thousand or fifty thousand years ago than that it 
should only become perfect six thousand, twenty thousand, or 
one hundred thousand years in the future. God does not, 
so far as we know, make perfect oak trees. Oak trees 
spring from acorns and develop and unfold gradually ; and 
only after long years do they become complete. And so the 
world — as we have come not simply to believe, but to know, 



The Origin of Goodness. 39 

in these modern days — was not a complete and finished 
thing at the first; but it has unfolded slowly, age after age, 
developing after the law of its inner life, and so taking on 
form and beauty. This is the order of God's work every- 
where. And curiously enough we shall find that this is 
really the thought of the ancient prophets of Israel, the 
thought of Jesus, the thought of Paul and the disciples. 
They look forward to a perfect world as an ideal j as a hope 
to be realized in some time to come. And as you look back 
and turn over the pages of the Old Testament, you will find 
that there is no belief there, throughout the larger part of it, 
of any early paradise, of any perfect condition of things at the 
first. Paradise comes in after the captivity, as a thing bor- 
rowed from Babylonian paganism. It is a thing unknown to 
the prophets, and is nowhere recognized or spoken of by the 
great leaders of Jewish thought. We, then, I say, do not 
simply believe — we know — that the world did not start 
finished and perfect. We know that humanity did not start 
finished and complete. We know that evil did not come 
foisted upon the world of God as something from without, 
something apart from the nature of things. 

What is evil 1 We talk about it still as though it were a 
thing, an entity, a substance. And if we go back we shall 
find that men have been accustomed in the past to speak of 
it even as personifi.ed. It was a being j it was a real thing \ 
it was something that could be cast out and that could come 
into a man. So they have been accustomed to speak of 
disease. Disease is not a substance. It is not a thing. 
Why, they used to regard disease as the presence in the 
body of a possessing spirit ; a demon that could be cast out 
by some form of pious exorcism ; a being that was afraid of 
holy water, afraid of the cross, afraid of the pious words of 
the priest. A pain was something that could be let out 
through a gash made by a sharp knife in the body. And we 
talk about disease now, sometimes, as though it were a 
humor in the blood, some sort of tangible real entity. But 
intelligent men know now that disease is not a thing, a sub- 



40 TJlc Morals of Evolution. 

stance, any more than darkness is a substance, — it is simply 
the absence of light; any more than cold is a substance, — it 
is simply a lack of motion that generates heat. And so evil 
is not a thing in the nature of man. Disease is not a thing in 
the body : it is simply an abnormal condition of the cells, 
organs, and functions of the body ; something that interferes 
with the natural and perfect working of the system. And so 
sin or evil is not a thing : it is simply a lack of recognition 
of, and obedience to, the perfect laws of human life ; or the 
wrong direction of forces that are right. 

Starting, then, to discuss the origin of goodness instead of 
the origin of evil, we assume that goodness exists. We 
assume that the universe in its essential nature and outcome 
is good j that the laws of things, if only understood, if only 
obeyed, will result in those things that we have learned to 
call right. Now what do we mean by goodness? In its 
essential nature it is a state of heart, an inclination of the 
will, a desire and a purpose to do that which we perceive to 
be right, to be conducive to the welfare and happiness of 
mankind. In its external features, however, goodness is a 
kind of conduct opposed to another kind of conduct which we 
distinguish as evil, or hurtful, as injuring ourselves, as injur- 
ing our fellows, as lowering the tone of life, as taking away 
from the fulness of the world's beauty and happiness and 
peace. Now this goodness is a thing that, so far as the con- 
sciousness of man is concerned, has been discovered. Man 
was not a good being originally, any more than he v/as an 
evil being. Goodness has been discovered in the experience 
of the world, — just as precisely, as truly, and in substantially 
the same sense as the laws of astronomy have been discov- 
ered. This Copernican system of which we talk has been 
knovv'n to the world only two or three hundred years. Did 
it come into existence only two hundred or three hundred 
years ago ? Why, of course it is eternal. The Copernican 
system is as old as the existence of the stars and the moons 
and the worlds. But so far as man's thought of it, his con- 
sciousness of it, is concerned, I say it is a di.scovery that his 



The Origin of Goodness. 41 

experience and thought have unfolded to him. And so, pre- 
cisely, goodness is a discovery. Men from the first per- 
formed certain acts that were good, just as the planets 
revolved around the sun. Men thought certain thoughts that 
were good, they followed certain inclinations and emotions of 
the heart that were good ; but they did not think of them as 
good, they did not recognize them as good, they made no 
distinction between that which is good and that which is evil. 

When, then, did goodness come into the consciousness of 
man ? When for the first time — I know not vvhen that was 
— a man or a number of men recognized the laws of their 
life and the laws of the relations in which they should stand 
to their fellow-men, when they recognized them as good in 
themselves apart from any commandment from without that 
bade them to keep them^, and when their hearts responded to 
these laws of right and truth and they determined to keep 
them, — then, at that moment, whenever it was, what we call 
rightly by the name of goodness was born. You are not to 
think that this came to pass all at once; that any whole 
family, any whole nation, discovered and recognized goodness 
simultaneously. You are not to think that humanity marches 
upward from its unmoral condition until all at once goodness 
dawns upon it as the morning dawns upon the world lying 
in darkness. For there are thousands and thousands of 
people, whole nations in the world to-day, in which goodness, 
in the highest sense of the term, as we understand it at the 
present time, does not exist. There are multitudes in 
modern churches that are not good in the highest sense of 
the word. I fear there are many of us — perhaps all of us at 
times — that are not yet good in the noblest meaning of the 
term. 

Let me make clear to you in a moment, before I go on, 
just what I mean and how much I mean. I remember a 
man out West, a member of my own church, who said to me 
one day : " If there was not any devil, I do not believe there 
would be many Christians." That man was not a good man. 
He did not choose that which we call virtue because he rec- 



42 The Morals of Evolution. 

ognized the fact that it was lovely and beautiful. He chose 
it for fear of something to come afterward. If a policeman 
should enter one of your houses, and force you to give 
money to a charitable cause, compel you to go out into the 
street to help a fellow-man, you would say at once that the 
act on the part of the man so compelled was not a good act. 
Why ? Because it was done under compulsion. The ele- 
ment of force, when it comes in, takes away the morality of 
the action, making it neither good nor bad. If the police- 
man should take him by the hand, and put into that hand a 
revolver, and point it at the head of his friend, and compel 
him to fire it off, he would not be guilty of any crime, 
because the element of volition would be taken away. Now 
it makes no difference what this power is that comes in and 
compels a man to do that which he would not choose. If it 
is the fear of hell, if it is the fear of God, if it is the fear of 
the policeman, if it is the fear of society, of public opinion, — 
no matter what kind of fear it may be, or whatever form the 
compulsion, — if this is the ultimate reason why you do this, 
and why you refrain from that, then you have not yet risen 
into the condition of a free moral man or woman. I remem- 
ber a case of a discussion on the part of a Universalist 
minister with another of the opposite creed, concerning the 
subject of future punishment. And in his speech the latter 
said : " If I believed, as this minister does, that there is no 
hell, then I would have my fling. I would take the pleasure 
of life as it goes along. I would follow my appetites and 
inclinations. Why should I deny myself?" When it came 
the turn of the Universalist to reply, he simply looked the 
man over from head to foot and said : " Judging your 
character as well as I can by your looks, I believe that you 
would." 

You recognize at once — and this, of course, is the point — 
that a man so feeling is not a moral man. He may be 
scrupulously honest in his business ; he may be true in the 
relations in which he stands to his family ; he may be faithful 
in his neighborly duties : but if it is either fear of hell, or 



The Origin of Goodness. 43 

fear of God, or fear of the police, or fear of his fellow-men, 
that compels him to do that which he does not recognize as 
right and true and beautiful in itself, and which he would 
not do were all these restraints removed, then I say that man 
is not, in the true and highest sense of the word, good. He 
has not attained free moral self-control as yet. He may be 
on the road to it, but it is something far in the future with 
him. So much to illustrate, as much as my present purpose 
requires, what I mean by goodness. 

Now, then, let us see by what process this goodness has 
been developed in the history of the world. It will require 
a little effort on the part of your imagination to picture to 
yourselves unmoral humianity. I only etch in rough outline 
a picture for your thought to fill in. 

I want you to see man — as near as we can come to his 
true condition — as he was at the first. Of course, vv^e cannot 
reach him as he v\^as at the beginning ; for when we come to 
the lowest, farthest, dimmest point of human history, we 
must remember that then we have not found the place 
where humanity started. For man is old. Nobody knows 
how many years, how many centuries, how many thousands 
of years old humanity is when it first emerges from the 
darkness and comies within scope of our modern vision. 
But think of man stripped of all those attributes and qual- 
ities and attainments that make up civilization. Blot out all 
the cities from the face of the earth. Destroy all the road- 
ways, — not only those of iron rail, but even carriage-roads 
and foot-paths. Level all the buildings with the dust, and 
blot out the very remnants of them, so that you shall forget 
that they have ever existed. Sweep every ship from every 
sea. Blot out everything that represents the attainments 
of civilized man. And not only wipe off of the face of the 
earth all the results of human activity, and human invention, 
and human ingenuity, and human enterprise, and let the 
world be a wilderness and a jungle, but do a more difficult 
thing still : conceive, if you can, of the inner thoughts of 
men that correspond and have led to the creation of this 



44 ' The Morals of EvoliUion. 

external civilization — consider these as not existing. Think 
of man as never having written a book, as never having 
written a sentence, even his name ; as not yet perhaps 
having attained the dignity of possessing a name. Think 
of him stripped, wild and naked in the woods, with rude 
ideas, with no weapons, with no tools, without even a hut or 
a fire, — wild, savage, uncultivated man. Here is where we 
want to start. Now this being is not a moral being ; neither 
is he an immoral being. We make a huge mistake when we 
look over the barbarous portion of the earth and apply to it 
our modern standard of thinking and action. It has not 
occurred yet to this wild being, standing on the very confines 
of humanity, that there is any such thing as right and wrong. 
It has not occurred to him as yet that there are any such 
things in existence as laws, either laws of man or laws of 
nature or laws of his body. He knows nothing of the stars 
above his head, except that they are little shining points. 
The sun to him is a being, or an animal, or a chariot driven 
across the sky, — when he has become civilized enough to 
think of a chariot or of horses. The winds, — he knows 
nothing of the laws by which they move ; he does not even 
know that there is an atmosphere surrounding the earth. 
He knows nothing of all that which makes the sum total of 
modern knowledge. Now I say this being is not a m.oral 
being : he is merely an unmoral being. 

Now I wish to lead you step by step, not exhaustively, but 
simply by way of suggestion, along the pathway by which he 
comes to be developed into a being recognizing the distinc- 
tion between right and wrong. We must think of him first, 
then, as a wild man of the woods. Now what are the forces 
that play upon him.? What are the great powers that lake 
him in their hands and shape him and lead him on towards 
the height of the attainment represented by our modern 
world ? The first thing that he recognizes is this external 
world. And he learns gradually that here are forces and 
powers that he must be afraid of, that he must guard against. 
Here are heat and cold and tempest. Here is the danger of 



The Origin of Goodness. 45 

starving, unless he supplies himself with food. Here are wild 
beasts and wilder men. Here are all these forces of the 
external world, — the winds and the storms that beat upon 
him, the cold that freezes him, the earthquake that makes 
the world tremble beneath his feet. These shape him and 
mould him into certain courses of conduct, driving him along 
the pathway that begins to point towards the modern world. 
How do they do it ? Simply by making him feel that he 
must do certain things, or else suffer or die ; that he must 
refrain from doing certain things, or else suffer or die. And 
besides the power of this external world, there is another that 
takes him into its hands ; and that is the political power. 
Some one in his tribe gains prominence and becomes chief, 
a despot, ruling with an iron hand, controlling the destinies 
of the tribe. This political force takes him and shapes him ; 
compels him, perhaps, to respect some of the rights of his 
fellow tribesmen ; prevents him from killing his fellows and 
directs his murderous feelings only towards his enemies. 
This political force touches him at every point, and shapes 
all the habits of his life. And then, in the third place, there 
comes in the power of society, the estimation in which he is 
held by his fellows, — the same power which is the mightiest 
of all controlling forces upon us to-day. This we shall iind 
in the lowest condition of barbarism quite as im.perious, and 
even more so perhaps, than it is now. The young brave 
must do something to win an honorable position in his tribe. 
He must accomplish some feat of daring before any of the 
maidens of his tribe will look upon him as manly and hon- 
orable enough to claim and win her affection. And so one 
after another all these social forces seize upon him and shape 
the courses of his conduct. And then, mightier than all the 
rest, are the religious forces that deal with him. They con- 
trol his thinking, the schemes of his brain and the emotions 
of his heart. They even shape and regulate all the external 
activities of his life. He has no idea of one God ; he has 
thoughts of many. All the powers about him he thinks of as 
separate beings. He is afraid of the spirits of his dead 



46 .,J^he Mo7'als of Evohctio7t. 

ancestors. He is afraid of tlie power of the scorching sun. 
He is afraid of the sweep of the hurricane. He is afraid of 
the current of the stream that makes it dangerous for him to 
cross, or that drags under the comrade swimming on its sur- 
face. He is afraid of ten thousand forms and forces. The 
universe is just alive with these imaginary beings that either 
love or hate him, which he seeks to propitiate or make 
friends with. Now this reUgious power comes in and restricts 
his conduct, compelling him into certain activities and driv- 
ing him away from certain other courses of action. 

But have these all resulted in making him a moral being ? 
No. The forces of the external world, the political force, 
the social force, the religious force, may all work upon and 
mould a human being and yet stop short of making him 
moral. Similar forces have worked upon, and do still work 
upon, the lovv^er animals ; and yet they have not developed 
anything like morality in them. Man begins to act with a 
forethought for the future ; he seeks to avoid pain and to 
preserve his life. He is afraid of the wind or the storm or 
the hunger or the cold ; afraid of his chief ; afraid of the 
fellow-men of his tribe ; afraid of the gods ; or, on the other 
hand, he seeks the satisfaction of his tumultuous passions 
and desires. Through all these experiences he is gradually 
learning to live ; but he is not yet a moral being. 

Now let me outline, as plainly and simply as I can, a few 
of the steps by which these forces are preparing the way to 
make him moral. These are " school-masters to lead him to " 
morality. What are the roots, the essential principles, of 
this moral nature of ours, and how are they developed } In 
the first place, these powers outside of man have impressed 
upon his thought and upon his physical and mental and 
moral and spiritual organization, and impressed it age after 
age and by reiterated touch after touch, that there are 
eternal, inexorable, unchanging laws ; powers all around him 
with which he must deal. That is the first thing ; that is the 
very first and lowest condition of intelligent moral character 
or activity on the part of man. What is the next step ? It 



The Origin of Goodness. 47 

is this : He has learned that these powers are the conditions 
of his life ; that he cannot defy them without pain ; that he 
cannot defy them without subtracting from the sum total of 
his being; that he cannot defy them long without death. 
He has learned, in other words, that these laws, powers, and 
forces that are around him are the very laws of his existence, 
and that he cannot disregard them. 

What is the next step? This: and most important it is. 
The thought that these laws are all about him, and that he 
cannot disregard them, — these drive him in upon himself and 
develop the rude beginnings of self-control. And self-con- 
trol you will recognize as the very starting-point and funda- 
mental principle of morality. He has learned, for example, 
that he cannot let his moods run away wdth him ; that he 
cannot do "as he pleases," as we say, without thought of the 
consequences ; that he must recognize this barrier on the 
one hand, and that contesting claim on the other ; and in- 
stead of doing as he pleases he must do as these powers com- 
mand : and so impulse is restrained, and, as I said, he is 
driven in upon himself and taught the necessity and the first 
beginnings of the power of self-control. 

And next, this self-control develops the ability to postpone 
immediate gratification and the immediate attainment of the 
desires of the moment, and makes him think of what will 
happen afterward ; makes him consider to-morrow and next 
year, and at last, the uncounted years of the future. And 
here again is one of the absolute conditions of moral char- 
acter. A man who lives simply for the day, who takes no 
thought for the morrow, is not a civilized man, is not a moral 
being. The very essence of morality is that we shall think 
of the results of our present activities, whether they are to 
be good or evil, and so control ourselves by postponing the 
things we desire now, in view of what shall be the necessary 
result of those activities in the future. 

Starting with fear, — for man at first, I suppose, we must 
think of as simply afraid, afraid and cowering, shrinking 
out of sight in the jungle and in the caves, afraid of all these 



48 The Morals of EvoliLtion. 

mysterious forces about him, the nature of which he does not 
understand, — this fear will pass naturally and of necessity, 
after a time, into reverence. He will recognize these powers 
and forces as great. There is something in them that 
inspires awe. He sees that they are not altogether evil ; 
that if he attends to them and obeys them they work good 
for him : and so he begins to revere them. And then, as the 
goodness of their nature and their disposition toward him 
become more and more manifest, the reverence takes another 
step and blossoms out into admiration. The man begins to 
admire the sun ; he begins to admire the winds and the 
might of these great forces ; he begins to admire the sup- 
posed gods who control these forces ; he begins to admire 
the fathers of the tribe, the chiefs ; he begins to admire all 
these mighty powers of which hitherto he has simply been 
afraid. And this admiration, — do you see v/here it leads in 
its next step? It leads to the man who bows his head in 
adoration ; for the next step after admiration is worship. 
Admiration itself is the root and the essential idea of 
worship. He who admires anything that he conceives to be 
above him has begun, consciously or unconsciously, to culti- 
vate his higher religious nature. And then, v^'hen we have 
begun to admire, we naturally go on to love. We learn, of 
necessity, to love that which we regard as admirable. 

And now I have led you, briefly but suggestively, £tep by 
step, to the point which is the conclusion of our journey. 
For when man, through fear, through reverence, through 
admiration, through love, has come to recognize the laws of 
his own nature and the laws of the universe about him as 
being naturally good, — when he has reached that point, then 
free moral agency, that which I have called goodness, is 
born. When you recognize the laws of this universe as 
necessary laws, as the conditions of your being, the condi- 
tions of your growth, the conditions of your happiness 
when you recognize the laws of your physical frame, not as 
hindrances, not as evil forces standing in the way of perfect 
gratification, but as the necessary laws of your physical 



The Origin of Goodness. 49 

being, precisely as the construction of a piano or violin or 
any other musical instrument is the law in accordance with 
which it can be played and its music be developed, — when, 
I say, you have recognized these laws of life as essential, as 
necessary, as good, and have chosen them, not because you 
are afraid of them, not because you are afraid of God, not 
because you care for the opinion of your fellow-men, not 
because you are afraid of the arm of the law or a court of 
justice, — when you have recognized them and chosen them 
voluntarily, lovingly, then, for you, goodness has been born. 
You have become a good man \ a man who can be trusted 
even if religious beliefs have passed away ; a man who can 
be trusted even if courts were abolished ; a man — the 
highest specimen of humanity, perhaps, that we can conceive 
of — who can be trusted in his closet; who can be trusted 
in the darkness of midnight ; who can be trusted when he is 
alone and when he knows that no human being will ever 
become cognizant of his deeds. A man is good when he 
has reached this point of seeing the laws about his life, 
seeing that they are essential and good laws, and when he 
voluntarily chooses to obey them. 



THE NATURE OF GOODNESS 



We are now to consider that part of our subject which 
is fundamental to the whole. We are to ask ourselves the 
question as to what is the nature of goodness ; as to why 
certain courses of conduct are called good, and why certain 
other courses are called evil ; as to what is the standard of 
judgment ; whether there is any permanent and eternal one ; 
as to what is the ultimate end of human existence that makes 
it necessary for us, in order to attain it, to pursue certain 
lines of conduct rather than certain other lines, — this is the 
broad, great subject that I am to attempt to handle. 

The law that determines the right use of any inanimate 
thing is the law of its nature, that which it is fitted for, the 
highest and best use to which it can possibly be put. For 
instance, we say of a piece of woodland that it is good; 
good to answer the ends of beauty to the artist; good to 
answer the purpose of furnishing timber for the architect 
or the ship-builder ; good for whatever purpose its structure, 
the grain of the wood, and its general qualities make it cap- 
able of. The same is true of a piece of meadow or a water- 
fall. The fall is good for the painter ; it is good to turn the 
wheels of a mill, and so be the mainspring of a great factory;^ 
good for the highest and best ends that its nature fits it for. 

And when we leave inanimate things and come to the 
animal world, we are justified in saying of a lion or a tiger 
or an eagle that it is good in the sense of the first chapter 
of Genesis where it is said after the completion of the crea- 
tion, the Lord looked down from heaven and pronounced all 
the work that he had made " very good." Of course what 



The Nature of Goodness 5 1 

is meant here is, that each thing, according to its nature, is 
good for the kind of life it is intended to Hve,^ — fitted by 
nature for that life. That is why we call it good. 

When we come up to the range of the higher animals, the 
domestic animals, those that come into connection with and 
are useful to the service of man, we say that these are good 
or bad according as they are fitted to render us those ofiices 
and services that we require of them. A horse is good for 
the plough when he is fitted finely for that kind of work. He 
is good for the road when he is gifted with speed and endur- 
ance, — those qualities that fit him for the race. And so of 
every form of animal life whatsoever. A dog is good as a 
pointer, as a setter, as a watch-dog, according to whether he 
is fitted or not for the performance of those things that we 
require of him. 

Now when we come into the higher life of man, must we 
change our principle 1 I think not. The ultimate law of all 
human life, of all human activity, is the natural law of our 
constitution; the law of our physical, mental, and moral 
structure : that which we are capable of being, of doing, of 
becoming : the law of our relation to our fellow-men, the law 
by which we are related to the world around us, to the past 
and to the future. We say that a man has the right, and not 
only the right, but, after he is born, it is his duty, to live. It 
is his right and his duty to live just as full and rounded and 
complete a life as he can. It is his duty not to stand still. 
It is his right and his duty to lift up the tone and level of his 
life, to advance that life, — to progress, as we say. But the 
individual does not stand in the universe alone. It is his 
right and duty not only to develop and make the most pos- 
sible of his own individual self, but he is linked by bonds, from 
which he can never escape, to his fellow-men ; so that it is his 
right and his duty not only to live himself, to make his own 
life full, to advance his own life, but to help others live also 
in their degree : to do all he can to make their lives full 
rounded, and complete, to lift up the tone and level of their 
lives, to help on the general progress- of the world. 



52 The Morals of Evolution. 

Now the experience of men has determined it beyond a 
question that certain courses of conduct do tend to the pres- 
ervation of hfe ; do tend to fulfil and round out life ; do tend 
to lift up the level of human activity to something still 
higher, something still fuller, something larger in the way of 
life. These courses of conduct are not made conducive to 
these ends by any outside power ; they are not made con- 
ducive to these ends by any inside intuition or monitor ; they 
are the very laws that constitute existence, the laws that man 
cannot break without paying the price, without taking away 
from the quality and quantity of his life, without lowering 
its tone, without, if he persists long enough, bringing that 
life to an end, and destroying the whole scheme of things. 
The ultimate law, then, of conduct, I say — and this is the 
proposition I wish to go on for the present to substantiate, — 
the ultimate law of conduct, is the natural law that makes us 
what we are, and that sets us in the relations in which we 
stand to our fellow-men and to the world about us, just pre- 
cisely as the laws of water and the banks of a river consti- 
tute that river; and if you should change those laws so 
that water should no longer flow, or if you should break 
down the banks of the river, you would have destroyed the 
river itself. It is these that make its whole existence, and 
by which its currents flow. 

We must now, in substantiating this position, consider, in 
relation to it, some of the great schemes of morality that 
have been held and taught in the world, and see how they 
bear upon this which we claim to be fundamental and per- 
manent. For example : there are large numbers of people 
at the present time, and there always have been — though I 
trust they are lessening as intelligence grows — who hold and 
teach that the only law of human conduct is the convention- 
ality of the time, — • the law of habit of any particular people 
or race or age. They see, as they look over the world, cer- 
tain superficial facts, that seem to justify them in coming to 
this conclusion. They see, for example, that one race, one 
nation, one religion, lives out a certain line of conduct, fol- 



The Nature of Goodness. 53 

lows after certain ideals, and that this is what the habit, 
the conventionality of the time justifies, and that when this 
habit of the people changes the moral conduct changes. 
But you will see, of course, that there can be no essential or 
permanent morality if this be admitted as true. If it is only 
the habits of the people, the moment these habits change 
morality changes, and may be conceived of as passing 
entirely away. If you will only bear in mind the definition I 
have given, you will be able, I think, to see that there is 
something deeper than this, somiCthing eternal, something 
bound up in the very life of man himself. Whether the con- 
ventional habits of the people approve of it or not, if I put 
my hand into the fire, it will burn, and my hand will be 
destroyed. Whether the conventional habits of the people 
approve of it or not, if I take poison instead of food into my 
system, I shall die. That is, without any regard to the 
opinions of the time, if I break a physical law, that physical 
law takes its revenge in pain, in disintegration, in death itself. 
And precisely as this physical law cannot be broken with 
impunity, so the mental and moral and spiritual laws of life are 
those which constitute the very conditions of life itself ; and 
no matter what the public opinion is about it. Suppose the 
popular opinion of the time countenanced immorality, does 
that make immorality harmless ? There have been ages so 
shameless as that those things which we count as most dis- 
graceful and evil have been popular, and practised by almost 
everybody \ and yet they have been ages of disintegra- 
tion, ages of death, ages that like a cararact have rushed on 
toward the brink, and plunged over into an abyss of ruin. 
The laws remain, whether public opinion changes about them 
or not. You can no more change or take away the moral 
law by public opinion, you can no more set it up or take it 
down by popular favor or popular will, than you can annul 
the law of gravitation by a vote of the city of Boston. 
These moral laws are the laws of things. 

Plato and Aristotle and some of the more prominent 
among English philosophers have taught that the ultimate 



54 The Morals of Ezwlutioii. 

reason for conduct is the State ; law, that is, the enacted 
law of the constituted rulers of the time ; that there is no 
justice and no injustice where there is no statute. Of 
course, if my definition is true, as I think it must appear 
to you to be, you will see the fallacy of the fundamental 
principle of these great philosophers who have swayed hu- 
man opinion in this direction so long. Whether the State 
justifies it or not, the breaking of any of the natural laws 
of our life or of society will result in the destruction of 
this natural life or of the social life. If the statute laws 
echo these natural laws of life and of society, then well 
and good ; they are binding. But they are not binding 
because they are statutes, but because they are in accord 
with the eternal laws of things. This is the ultimate ; a law 
that echoes, a statute that echoes, the natural law of life is 
a good law j one that does not is bad law, and ought to be 
repealed j for these natural laws are ultimate and eternal. 

There is one other standard of right action and wrong 
which is very popular still in the world, and perhaps more 
universal than any other. Men are accustomed to say : The 
ultimate thing in this matter, the standard by which I must 
judge of right and wrong, is my personal intuition of right 
and wrong, — my own conscience, in other words, — for con- 
science is simply the voice of this moral intuition. But we 
have only to look a little way over the M^orld, and survey for 
a few moments the past history of men, to find out that there 
has been no agreement in regard to this matter of the voice 
of conscience. Men have conscientiously done the most 
evil things. Men have conscientiously opposed the advance 
of the world, those things which were essential to its highest 
welfare. Men to-day are conscientiously wrong in regard to 
a thousand things. And if you come to this principle, and 
\ make each man's conscience the ultimate law, you will 
1 work a widespread demoralization instead of building up 
1 a morality ; because you thereby admit that each man's in- 
\ tuition, each man's conscience, must be his law, no matter 
whether it is a prejudiced, ignorant, bigoted, and weak con- 



The Nature of Goodness. 5 5 

science, or whether it is a good and noble one. And the 
very moment that you admit that the conscience must ' be 
educated, that the conscience must be referred to something 
else by which itself must be judged, that moment you admit 
that conscience is not ultimate and final ; for when a person 
has the right to appeal from a court, it is thereby admitted 
that it is not a court of final judicature, is not the court of 
last appeal. Conscience is not and cannot be ultimate. 
Conscience does not tell people what is wrong and what 
is right. It is simply a feeling of the moral nature that we 
ought to do right, but it does not tell anybody what right 
is ; that is the result of human experience the result of 
judgment and training and knowledge. 

There is one other theory that is coincident with the 
teaching of the whole Orthodox world, and that is held 
by large numbers of people outside and beyond it. They 
say the ultimate standard of right, that to which everything 
must finally be referred, is the will of God ; the will of God 
as manifested through a priesthood, perhaps, or through a 
church that is infallible, or through a book ; but in whatever 
way, they say the ultimate reason for conduct is the will of 
God. Now, in one sense, I believe that is true ; but in an- 
other, and that the popular sense as I understand it, I do 
not believe it. If by the will of God you mean these laws of 
life to which I have referred ; if you regard these laws of 
body, of brain, of heart, of mind, — these laws of human 
relationship and association, these laws of the universe 
about us, — if you regard these simply as the expression of 
the will of God, then, of course, it makes no difference 
whether you call it law of nature or will of God ; for the two 
are identical. But if you mean by the will of God something 
apart from these laws of nature, something outside of them, 
something assumed to be above them, then the will of God 
is not and cannot be the ultimate' law of human activity. 
Whatever may be the will of God, no matter what it may be 
assumed to be or taught to be, it still must be true forever 
that if I disregard the law of gravitation, and step over the 



56 The Morals of EvoliUio7i. 

edge of a precipice, I shall be hurled in ruin and death upon 
the rocks below. Whatever may be the will of God, or may 
be assumed to be the will of God in regard to me, if I break 
any physical law, any mental law, any moral law of my 
being, that law takes its revenge. These, as I have said, 
are the constituent laws of my life ; and no matter about 
anything outside or beyond or above these, I cannot break 
them with impunity; and to keep them means life, means 
health, means happiness, means peace. It depends, then, 
entirely upon what you mean by the phrase whether the will 
of God is the ultimate thing. As men are accustomed to 
picture God as a being standing outside of these laws of 
nature, and looking upon them as something apart from 
himself, with which he may interfere, that he may suspend 
for his purpose, that he may command or disregard, — looking 
at God, I say, in this way, I should deny most emphatically 
that his will is the ultimate law of human conduct. I believe 
that the will of God is the ultimate law, because I believe 
that these laws of life, laws of nature, laws of society, are 
simply the utterance and expression of the divine will ; and 
they are of authority, not because we call them the will of 
God, but because they are the natural laws of life. 

It is said a great many times — and I must touch upon 
these two points in passing' — that there can be no permanent 
and eternal law of morality unless we believe in a God and a 
future life. Now, friends, you know me well enough to know 
what my beliefs are about God and a future life, so that you 
will not misunderstand me in what I am about to say. But I 
believe that this moral law stands by virtue of its own right, 
and would stand just the same without any regard to the 
questions of immortality or the discussion between theism and 
atheism. If there be no God at all, am I not living ? Are 
there not laws according to which my body is constructed, — 
laws of health, laws of life, laws that I must keep in order 
to live and in order to be well ? If there be no God at all, 
are you not existing ? Have I a right to steal your property, 



The Nature of Goodness. 5 / 

to injure you, to render you unhappy, because, forsooth, I 
choose to doubt whether there is a God, or because you 
choose to doubt whether there is a God ? Are not the laws 
of society existing in themselves and by their own nature ? 
Suppose all the world should suddenly lose its regard for 
truth, and become false all through and through, so that no 
man could depend upon his brother, would not society be 
disintegrated, disorganized ? Would not all commercial and 
social life suddenly become impossible ? Would not hu- 
manity become a chaos and a wreck, and that without any 
sort of regard to the question as to whether men believed in 
a God or did not believe in one ? These laws are essential 
in the nature of things j and they stand, and you live by 
keeping them, and die by breaking them, whether there is a: 
God or is not. 

Suppose, for a moment, in regard to that other question^ 
that there is no future life. Does morality fall ? I think not. 
Am I not living to-day, whether I am to live to-morrow or 
not ? Will not certain things give me pain to-day, whether I 
am to live to-morrow or not ? Will not certain courses of con- 
duct produce sickness, whether I am to live to-morrow or not t 
Will they not produce death, if I follow them out, without 
any regard to the question whether I am to live to-morrow, 
next year, or forever ? Do we not stand in certain relations 
to each other to-day, so that I can hurt you or you can hurt 
me, so that I can help you or you can help me ; so that I 
can add to your happiness or misery or you can add to my 
happiness or misery, and that without any regard to the 
question as to how long we are to exist ? These laws are 
the laws, as I have said, — and I repeat it for emphasis and 
shall repeat it again, — these are the laws in the nature of 
things by which I live and by which you live. It does not 
make one particle of difference in regard to the validity of 
these laws, whether we are to live forever or only one hour. 
You, of course, are at liberty to say — any man is at liberty 
to say — if there is not any God, and if there is no future 
life, why, then, I won't keep these moral laws : I have no 



58 The Morals of EvQliUio7i. 

sufficient motive for keeping them. Of course you are at 
liberty to say that. But these laws will say just the same 
to your laxity and disregard of them ; if you don't keep 
them you shall die ; and you will, too. Whether there is any 
God, or any future life or not, makes no sort of difference 
with the unchanging validity of these laws. They stand 
to-day, no matter how long they are going to stand. 

But v/hile these laws of our nature are the ultimate laws, 
the real conditions that control our conduct, yet there is 
something beyond this still to which I must call your atten- 
tion, — one other position which I must state and defend. 
I have said that we have the right to live, the right to make 
the most of our lives, and fill them out as fully as we can ; 
the right to progress ever toward something that seems to 
us higher and better. But why do I want to live ? why do 
you want to live ? This is this deeper question : What is 
the ultimate end and aim of life ? Simple bare existence is 
not the thing that people care for. You do not want to live 
just for the sake of living ; you want to live for something ; 
you feel that you have a right to live for something; you 
look and aim at something be3''ond mere breathing, — the 
things that constitute existence. There can, it seems to me, 
be only one ultimate reason that justifies sentient existence. 
There are three possible conditions toward which you can 
look as ideals. One is a condition where there shall be 
more happiness than there is unhappiness, — ■ that is, we can 
conceive of man as desiring happiness ; that is one thing. 
There is another possible state of mind for a sentient being : 
a condition where there is more unhappiness than there 
is happiness, — that is, a condition of sorrow and misery. 
There is another possible condition of a sentient being, and 
that is a condition of practical indifference ; you can hardly 
call it a condition of a sentient being, however, because if 
there were perfect indifference there would be a loss of 
consciousness, and no feeling at all. Now we cannot con- 
ceive of a sentient being desiring as the ultimate end and 
outcome of his life either of these three conditions, save that 



The Nature of Goodiiess. 59 

in which there shall be more happiness than unhappiness. 
It is the law of every healthy, free, sentient being that he 
should shrink from pain, and reach out after that which shall 
constitute pleasure or happiness. This we shall find to be 
the law, the necessary law, as it seems to me, of all sentient 
beings. Protoplasm, the learned men tell us, is the first form 
that living matter takes on. The lowest form of life we 
know, and the basis of all life, is protoplasm, — a little gluti- 
nous substance that does not seem to be organized at all. 
And yet it possesses one quality which is the fundamental 
and essential quality of all living things. It possesses, not 
consciousness as yet, but what scientific men call irritability, 
— the first crude form of feeling. The essential thing, then, 
in every living creature on the face of the earth, the one thing 
that separates life from that which is not life, is feeling, and 
motion in accord with feeling. We cannot conceive, then, I 
say, of any sentient being desiring or reaching after anything 
except a feeling, and that feeling, on the whole, a pleasurable 
one. The ultimate end of life, then, that which justifies the 
existence of sentient creatures, is happiness. You may call 
it pleasure ; you may call it happiness ; you may call it 
blessedness ; you may call it what you please, — it makes no 
difference, — it is some state, some condition, in which there 
is more of happy sentiency than there is of the opposite. 
This is the ultimate end and aim of life, and this you will 
find is in perfect accord with what we know of the structure 
of all beings upon the face of the earth. We are so made, 
every form of life is so made, from the lowest to the highest, 
from protoplasm to archangel — we are so constituted that 
pain is everywhere and always an indication of evil, an 
indication of a broken law, an indication of something out 
of the way ; and pleasure is always an indication of life, 
of health, of law obeyed, of conforming to the conditions 
of natural and healthful life. 

It may be true, indeed, and it many times comes true in 
the course of every life, that we must accept suffering in the 
lower life for the sake of a higher pleasure of a higher life 



6o The Morals of Evolution. 

in the upper ranges of our being ; but this suffering in the 
lower life is nevertheless a breach of the laws of the lower 
life, taking away from the fullness of that life and producing 
death at last. But on the principle that the highest law is 
capable of affording the highest pleasure, as in the case of 
the martyr, for example, who sacrifices his bodily life for his 
truth, he suffers in his physical nature, and he dies in his 
physical nature through suffering, but he rejoices in the 
higher ranges of his life, and lives in the higher ranges of 
his life ; as Paul says : " Though our outward man perish, yet 
the inward (higher) man is renewed day by day." So that 
pain is death where there is pain, and happiness is life where 
it exists. 

But men are accustomed to think — it has been preached 
and taught for ages — that happiness as an end is not a 
worthy thing j and they begin to talk about sensuality and 
the pleasures of epicurianism and all those awful things; 
and they speak of suffering and sacrifice as though they 
were good things for their own sake. Now this has come 
about as the result of two or three different causes. In the 
first place, men have been trained throughout almost all ages 
of the world, for thousands of years, to worship gods who 
were conceived of as cruel, — gods who took delight, there- 
fore, in human suffering ; so that suffering on their part has 
come to be looked at as a religious duty, as something that 
has merit in itself. We have inherited this tendency of be- 
lief and' thought, until it has become a part of our sense of 
duty. And then, again, the experience of the world has 
proved to us, and it will prove a great many times yet in the 
future, that in order to attain the highest life, and there- 
fore the highest ultimate of happiness, we must temporarily 
suffer; accept the cross before there can be any crown, as 
they say. And so men, discovering that pain is so fre- 
quently a condition of the highest kind of life, have come 
to a mental confusion between the condition and the end 
which they seek ; so that they have learned to look upon 
suffering as something meritorious in itself, instead of being, 



The Nature of Good^iess. 6 1 

as it is, everywhere and always evil, and only to be accepted 
for a larger and a higher good. 

But men oppose this objection to happiness as the end of 
hfe. They say we ought not to be good for the sake of 
being happy, but we ought to be good for the sake of good- 
ness. "Virtue is its own reward," they tell us. Let us 
analyze this just a moment, and see what is meant by it. 
Being good for the sake of being good. Goodness is 
either an outward course of conduct or an inner state of 
the heart. But why should we be good ? What for ? What, 
constitutes the essence of goodness, that which justifies it 
instead of the opposite t It is because the human race has 
found out by its age-long experience, that on the whole and 
in the long run, this course of conduct that men call good- 
ness has resulted in the welfare and highest happiness of 
the world. The absurdity of supposing that goodness can 
be separated from this notion of happiness as the outcome 
will be seen in a moment if you suppose that a course of 
conduct which is called good might ultimately result in the 
misery of the world. Suppose we should suddenly discover 
that a course of action we have called virtuous would ulti- 
mate in the unhappiness of man ; would you not say at once 
we ought not to be good any longer ? The very nature of 
goodness would be changed. That which results in the 
misery and destruction of the world cannot be good. But 
they say, and they seem to think it some grand, heroic thing 
to say, though as it is ordinarily meant it is a grand heresy 
— in the words of the old Latin adage — Fiat jusfitia, ruat 
coelum — "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall." 
But if any course of conduct that man should determine 
to pursue should result in the falling of the heavens, would 
not every one at once say that that was a wrong course of 
conduct, and ought not to have been followed ? "Let justice 
be done, though the heavens fall," then, when we analyze it, 
means justice is always expedient ; and, whatever may be the 
immediate result, or may appear to be, or threaten to be, do 



62 The Morals of Evolution. 

justice, and the heavens will not fall. As Wordsworth has 
expressed it so beautifully in his ode to duty : — 

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 

And the most ancient Heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong. 

There are two or three other considerations that I must 
take up, as bearing upon this ultimate end of human life. 
Men sa}^, if you tell the world that the ultimate object and 
aim of life is happiness, then they will speedily, each one for 
himself, go about seeking his immediate sensual gratifica- 
tions, and so morality itself will be destroyed. There is no 
possible fear of this, friends, for the experience of the world 
has demonstrated over and over again — it is demonstrating 
it to-day ; it must of necessity demonstrate it forever — that 
he who seeks his sensual gratification and the immediate 
satisfaction of his appetites and passions, will thereby 
destroy himself ; not only not attain his happiness, but 
attain misery. The world is learning this, I say ; so that, if 
you tell them that the ultimate end is happiness, they must 
find out by their experience forever that the way to obtain 
this happiness is not the way of immediate sensual gratifica- 
tion j that this is not only destructive of morality, but 
destructive of the very object that men desire, and for which 
they seek. 

But they tell us, that if you admit that happiness is the 
ultimate end for which sentient beings live, there will be no 
more unselfish action in the world. Each man will grasp after 
those things that he wants for himself, and let his neighbors 
come out as well as they can. But here again it seems to 
me so strange that men lose sight of the essential nature of 
man. I am an individual, constituted with a certain kind of 
complex organization ; but that is not all. I am a part of 
this larger organism called society ; and it is just as natural 
for me to act with regard to the welfare of those about me as 
it is for me to act for my own welfare ; and it is just as nat- 
ural for you. It is a libel on human nature, it is false to the 



The Nature of Goodness, 63 

law of human life, to say that the only natural thing in the 
world is selfishness. Take the mother bending over her 
cradle, night after night, and weary day after day, watching 
over the object of her love ; is she doing an unnatural thing 
under the impulse of morality, a sense of duty, of religion ? 
She is doing the most natural thing in the world; so that 
you would say she is an unnatural mother if she did not do 
it. Suppose I see a man in sorrow or in trouble, or any of 
you see him ; if you believe it is genuine, honest sorrow, it 
is the most natural thing in the world for you to help him. 
It is not natural for you to run away from him j you have to 
obey the feeling of sympathy in your heart, and it is just as 
natural as any other affection or quality of human nature. 
We are bound together, then, in society. The good Samari- 
tan was not a monstrosity ; he was a type of natural, human 
goodness. The sympathy that binds us to our fellows is just 
as natural as self-love which bids me look after my own 
welfare. And I find in my experience, and the world has 
found in its experience, that men are happier when they give 
full play and run to the sympathetic sides of their nature. 
The way to attain happiness, then, is not the selfish way, in 
the evil sense j it is the unselfish way, and the world has 
demonstrated it over and over again : so that the pursuit of 
happiness, the intelligent and- sensible pursuit of it, is by the 
pathway of sympathy and human helpfulness. For suppose, 
for the sake of saving yourself pain, you quench the sympa- 
thetic tendencies of your heart; you might possibly save 
yourself a little pain, but you would also lose that other 
finer, grander joy of helping men ; you lose more than you 
gain j and you shut out also the sympathy that binds you in 
the community of pleasure and happiness with your fellows. 
A man, then, that shuts himself up within himself shuts out 
the great world, and cuts himself off from the true, the 
loving, and the good, — as though, to 'escape the sight of one 
disagreeable object, a man should shut himself up in the 
dark, and thus lose the vision of all the earth's loveliness 



64 TJie Morals of Evolution. 

and beauty. The straight road, then, to human happiness is 
along the pathway of virtue, of truth, of human helpfulness. 

But men say, if you teach men that the ultimate ob- 
ject of life is happiness, then there will be no more 
martyrs. No more martyrs ! What does martyrdom mean ? 
Look at John Rogers at the stake, with the flames curl- 
ing about his feet. John Rogers knew perfectly well 
that if he chose to utter a few words of recantation 
he could be released, and go home and "enjoy himself," 
as people say. John Rogers then chose the stake; and 
why } He chose it because this higher, larger, divine nature 
in him preferred integrity and truth, even accompanied by 
the crackling of flames and death, — preferred it to the self- 
contempt and scorn that he would have been compelled to 
feel for his own degradation, if he had played false, and gone 
home to his hearthstone. John Rogers, then, chose the one 
thing that he preferred, under the circumstances and at the 
time, just as much as the drunkard chooses what he prefers 
when he goes to his cups. He chose what to him, being a 
grand, noble type of man, he saw was the largest and 
highest happiness. There is no contradiction, then, between 
this ultimate end of happiness and martyrdom, if you only 
enlarge your scope of thought until you can comprehend 
that a martyr may enjoy infinitely more than the sensualist. 

They tell us, again, that if you conceive of happiness as 
the ultimate end of life there will be no more progress; 
men will sim.ply look around them, adjust themselves to 
their immediate circumstances, make themselves comfor- 
table, and will stay where they are forever. But it is just 
as natural again, I say, for men to look upward, and desire 
something ahead of them, as it is to be comfortable where 
they are. Just so long as there is a mountain peak that 
overtops our present point of standing and outlook, just so 
long will men hunger for that higher height; just so long 
will it be natural for them to rejoice in struggling and 
striving to attain it ; just so long will they find their highest 
and most glorious gratification in the triumph of trampling 



The Nature of Goodness. 65 

obstacles under their feet, and climbing into those grander 
heights of nature and of God. There is no contradiction, 
then, between this law of progress and the ultimate end of 
happiness ; for a higher happiness — the experience of the 
world has proved it — comes by means of the struggle and 
the progress. 

The ultimate law of conduct, then, is this natural law that 
makes us what we are. The ultimate end of it all is happi- 
ness. But you will make a v/oful mistake — and against that 
I wish to guard you — if you jump to the unnatural and base- 
less conclusion, that because the ultimate end is happiness, 
therefore you are to make the immediate thought of happi- 
ness the motive of your activity and the standard by which 
you are to try your conduct. For here, again, the experience 
of the world has demonstrated that the way to attain the 
larger and higher happiness of man is the way of right, the 
way of regard to these laws of our nature and our life. We 
are, then, to keep these laws even at the cost of temporary 
suffering and pain, however severe ; not because the pain is 
not evil, but because being what we are and where we are 
the pain may lie right before us in the path towards larger 
good. We are, then, to do right, though the heavens 
threaten to fall, conscious that they will not fall if we do 
right, conscious that this doing right is the only way by 
which to attain the larger good. 

Now, then, friends, have I in any presumptuous fashion 
attempted to discover a new morality, to supersede the 
thought, the religious life, the intuitions of the world ? No, 
a thousand times, no. This morality is substantially the 
morality of the Sermon on the Mount. I am only giving in 
its essential features the preaching of Jesus himself. But 
there is one advantage which comes from this kind of pres- 
entation, which I have tried to give you : and that is, to shovv^ 
you that this moral teaching of Jesus, — present sacrifice 
when needful, in view of the larger good, — is not merely a 
beautiful sentiment of Christianity, but is grounded in the 



66 The Morals of Evolution. 

nature of things. I have simply attempted to lay bare 
to your view the basis of the morality of Jesus in the 
laws of the universe. But you are always to remember that 
principles are not authoritative because of the word of Jesus ; 
but that his word is authority only as it is true to the nature 
of things. They say that Jesus taught an utter disregard of 
happiness ; that his end is not human happiness : that it is 
the law of sacrifice, the law of suffering. Jesus himself is 
the great image of the world's glorified sorrow; the cross is 
his symbol, and not the crown. And yet, glance for a 
moment at the New Testament, and let us see what it 
teaches. He says: Blessed are the meek. Why? Be- 
cause meekness is a good thing in itself ? Blessed are the 
meekjy2?r — something shall come after. Blessed are the 
peacemakers -yfor — . Blessed are the pure in heart j^^r — . 
He stands uttering his beatitudes, telling men to bear and 
suffer day after day, with his finger pointed forever forward 
toward the ultimate end of happiness. Blessed are they that 
mourn ; for — . Blessed are ye when men shall persecute you 
and revile you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely ; 
for — . The for comes after every beatitude, and points 
towards something beyond itself, and to the attainment of 
which the beatitude is only a means. And what is that 
grander thing ? What means the New Testament statement 
of the apostle concerning Jesus himself, when he says of 
him, " who, for the joy that was set before him, endured the 
cross, despising the shame " ? He looked forward toward an 
ultimate, and that ultimate is forever — call it kingdom of 
heaven, call it kingdom of peace, call it whatever you will — 
a condition of human happiness, blessedness, and peace. 

And now, friends, there are two or three grand advantages 
that in conclusion I must call your attention to, in this method 
of presentation, this grounding of morality in the nature of 
things j and it is chiefly for this that I have been anxious to 
press it so earnestly upon your attention. We have been 
taught from the first, age after age, that morality found its 
ultimate reason in some theological scheme. All the minis- 



The Nature of Goodness. ■ 6/ 

ters, all the priesthoods, all the churches, have rung it in our 
ears, century after century, that there was no reason why 
people should behave themselves unless their theology was 
true. What wonder, then, that men so trained should rush 
into immorality when they come to doubt the foundation 
stones of the particular theological system in which they 
have been brought up ? We are told perpetually concerning 
the Catholic Church that it is only the power of this hierar- 
chy that keeps the mass of its ignorant followers decently 
moral. If they had been taught that morality rests on nat- 
ural laws and stands by its own stability, they could have 
been kept without telling them a lie. I say it is infidel 
toward God and this universe to assert that righteousness, 
the most important thing for man, must of necessity rest 
on a falsehood. If God cannot keep his universe stable 
without a lie, then the sooner we have chaos the better. I 
believe it is safe and right everywhere to tell men the truth. 
And when they have learned that the laws of morality are 
the laws of health, the laws of life, the laws of peace, the 
laws of happiness, not because the priest says so, but be- 
cause of the nature of things, then we can afford to do 
without the sham of a priesthood that is established upon a 
lie. I believe that the churches, then, are very largely guilty 
for the great floods of immorality that they talk about, and 
that threaten society, w^hen men lose faith in any particular 
religious scheme. For is it not the one doctrine that we 
have been taught from the first, that if there was no God, 
and if there was no future life, the way to be happy would 
be to break all the moral laws, and rush into every kind of 
evil ? Hasn't it been the teaching of the Church in all ages 
that, if it was not for the Bible, for the future life, for an 
angry God, the way really to have a good time would be to 
disregard the moral laws ? And yet nothing is truer in the 
nature of things than that the obedience to these laws of life 
and truth and right are the immediate pathway toward the 
largest, highest, and sweetest human happiness. And this 
old falsehood, then, that the churches have told for the sake 



6S ' The Alorals of Evolution. 

of bolstering up their beliefs is responsible for people's run- 
ning into excess when these beliefs are gone. 

Mr. Goldwin Smith, a leading thinker and writer of Eng- 
land — a liberal, too, by the way — has been so far carried 
away in his thinking with this old fallacy, that he has written 
a remarkable article recently, for the Atlantic Monthly^ " On 
the Prospect of a Moral Interregnum." That is, he assumed 
that the moral life of the people, having always been con- 
nected with some religious belief, now that Christianity, as he 
thinks, is passing away, is going to suffer a moral deluge for 
a while, until we get another religion. Nothing, it seems to 
me, has less real foundation than a thought like this. You 
might as well talk of an interregnum of the law of gravita- 
tion j you might as well talk of an interregnum of the laws 
of light or the laws of chemical affinity as to talk of a moral 
interregnum. Because people for the time do not keep the 
moral law, there is no moral interregnum, any more than 
there is an interregnum of the laws of life when a thousand 
persons are killed or commit suicide. It is because these 
laws do stand and must stand forever that the evil results of 
immorality come. 

Morality, then, stands in its own right — the eternal life, 
eternal force, eternal law of things ; and keeping these laws 
will lead us on, not only to virtue, but ultimately to the 
highest happiness of which our natures and our destiny 
make us capable. 



THE SENSE OF OBLIGATION, 



The inanimate things of the world move on their way 
under the power of resistless forces. There is of course no 
sense of obligation in their fulfilling their careers ; and yet, 
in the primary sense of that word, they are obliged, com- 
pelled, by powers which they cannot resist. There is on 
their part no feeling of having done a thing which is right, 
no remorse for having wrought evil. As Matthew Arnold 
expresses it : — 

Streams do not curb their tide 
A good man not to entomb, 
Nor lightnings turn aside 
To make his virtues room. 

These powers and forces move on, fulfilling their end, 
without any feeling, any conscience, any sense of good or 
evil. And the lower forms of life fulfil their careers by the 
laws of their nature in substantially the same way. The 
wild creatures of the world do nothing through any sense 
of obligation. They have no pleasure in the sense of doing 
right, no remorse for having wrought pain or evil to some 
other creature. But the moment you rise to the plane of 
the domesticated animals, those tjiat stand in some sort 
of relation of dependence toward man, you come into the 
region of at least a crude sense of obligation. You find 
these domestic animals feeling obliged to do so and so, out 
of regard for their masters and keepers. And even when 
the master is not a cruel one, and has never been in the 
habit of punishing for disobedience, you will find animals 
so close to man, so much in love with the master, that they 
will show a very deep, keen sense of shame for having dis- 
pleased him, and you will find the keenest possible sense of 



yo The Morals of Evolution. 

pleasure in the master's approbation. Here, then, is the 
first crude beginning of the sense of obligation; but of 
course we shall find it fully developed only as we come to 
man. And yet among some of the lower forms of human 
life you shall hardly find it any fuller grown than you do 
among the higher domestic animals. But it comes, of 
course, to perfect bloom and full fruitage only in human 
life. 

We want now to inquire what this sense of obligation 
means, the nature of its authority, how far it reaches, 
whether it is to be permanent, and whether it alone is 
enough as the impelling power in human life. These 
points we wish to take up briefly in their order. What, 
then, is the nature of this sense of obligation.'* Why do 
we feel obliged to do this, obliged to refrain from that, 
obliged to perform one thing when we would choose to per- 
form something else t The word, obligation, carries with it a 
sense of being bound by something ; whether it is an inner 
force or an outer, whether it is conscience or whether it is 
king, whether it is private will, whether" it is public opinion, 
no matter what it may be so far as this word, obligation, is con- 
cerned, it refers to something that binds us to a particular 
course of action rather than to another course. When we 
come to the word, ought, here we find something that is inti- 
mately connected with the verb, to owe. If you ought to 
do something, you owe it to somebody to perform this par- 
ticular action, to refrain from some other action. The word, 
duty, carries with it the same implication : it means that 
which is due to another. 

So much, then, for the meaning of the terms that we are 
to use. But how does this sense of obligation spring up t 
What does it mean ? It represents, I think, at first, a gap, a 
breach, a gulf between the actual in our lives and the ideal 
or the possible ; that is, we are living on a certain plane, 
living out a certain kind of life, performing a certain kind of 
actions, and we see above us and beyond us a certain other 
kind of life, certain other actions that we are capable of per- 



The Sense of Obligation. /I 

forming, and that we say we ought to perform, — that is, 
instead of being on this low level of human life, we ought to 
be up on this higher level. Whenever we say ought, then, we 
imply a gulf, a breach between the actual and the possible, 
between that which we really are and something higher and 
better that we might be. There are those teachers in the 
realm of ethics who tell us that the sense of obligation is 
simply the inherited result of the old-time reverence which 
children from time immemorial have been taught to feel 
towards their elders, towards those in authority, towards the 
chiefs of the tribes, towards the gods, towards those that 
they were taught they must at any rate obey. And there are 
others that supplement this by telling us that it is the result 
of the fact that men, living under law, under compulsion, 
have been punished from time immemorial for pursuing a 
certain course of action, and for not pursuing a certain other 
course of action ; and they say this sense of obligation has 
sprung up as the result of all this age-long training from 
generation to generation j that it is the result of the fact that 
from the beginning of the world men have been compelled to 
do so and so ; and now, after these external restraints are 
removed, men still feel this inherited compulsion, and say, I 
ought still to do these things which the human race has been 
trained from the first to do. But it seems to me that we are 
to find the root of it deeper than this : *I believe that it runs 
down into the innermost nature of man, and that it springs 
out of the age-long experience of the world. For example, I 
told you the other day that the law of the use or the conduct 
of anything or person was to be determined by the nature of 
that thing or person \ that is, we say that a knife ought to be 
sharp so that it is capable of cutting. Why ought it ? Why, 
because that is what a knife is for ; that is the nature of a 
knife ; that expresses the highest and best possibility of a 
knife. We say of a boat, a ship, or a yacht, that it ought to 
be capable of sailing, of weathering the storm, of buffeting 
the waves, of going safely through the hour of danger. Why? 
Because it is the nature of a good boat to accomplish that. 



72 The Morals of Evolution. 

We say of a watch that it ought to keep correct time. Why ? 
Because that is what a watch is for. A good watch must 
fulfil the law of its nature : if it does not, it is worthless. And 
so we say of any animal, of any creature of the universe. So 
v/e must say of man. Man ought — what? — ought to fulfil 
the highest possibility of his being ; ought to be a man ; 
ought to be all and the highest that being a man implies. 
Why ? That is his nature. Ke ouMit to fulfil the hidiest 

J o o 

possibilities of his being ; ought not simply to be an animal. 
Why ? Because there is something in him more than an 
animal. He ought not simply to be a brain, a thinking 
machine, although he ought to be that. Why? Because 
that does not exhaust the possibilities of his nature : he is 
capable of being something more, something higher than a 
brain. We say he ought to be a moral being. Why ? Because 
it is living out his nature to be a moral being. He ought to 
live as high, grand, and complete a life as it is possible for 
him to live, and he ought to stand in such relation to his 
fellow-men that he shall aid them in doing the same. Why ? 
Just the same as in all these other cases : because this and 
this only is developing the full and complete stature of a 
man, and he is not a man in the highest, truest, deepest 
sense of the word until he is that and does that ; he is only a 
fragment of a man so long as he is less and lower. Ought, 
then, means just that. The sense of obligation is the sense 
that we have when we see some height of our being over- 
topping our present attainment, and we say that we must 
strive to attain that in order to be all that we w^ere intended 
to be, all that we are capable of becoming. And w-e feel this 
because the experience of the world has demonstrated that 
only thus can w^e attain our own highest welfare and happi- 
ness, and help others to do the same. 

Ought, then, implies two things. It implies the doing of 
something useful. You never felt, or you never should feel, 
any sense of obligation to do that which is of no use. You 
may be inclined, as mere matter of play, to do a thousand 
things \ but you never feel I ought to do anything, unless 



The Sejtse of Obligation, 73 

you conceive of it as useful. And the other element that 
enters into this conception is the sense of difficulty. You 
never feel a sense of obligation to perform anything that 
you are perfectly inclined to perform, that is perfectly easy, 
that is perfectly simple, that you would just as lief do as not. 
The sense of obligation comes in when there is something 
before you that is difficult and useful. Both of these ideas 
must enter in to complete the conception. You ought to do 
this because it is useful, and you feel the ought because it is 
hard. 

So much, then, for the nature of this sense of obligation. 
Now, then, there is the other question that has perplexed all 
of you first or last, the question that has agitated the world 
and been discussed for thousands of years, — What, is the 
nature and extent of the authority of this sense of obligation? 
Ought I always, under all circumstances, to bow before this 
sense of obligation, and do that which I feel I ought to do ? 
And here I would guard my statements very carefully, lest I 
be misunderstood. I do not believe it is safe, as related to 
the moral sanity and the moral health of any man, woman, or 
child on earth, that this sense of obligation should be lightly 
disregarded ; because thus you blunt what ought to be its 
keen edge, you take away from its power and tenderness. 
And, if you accustom yourself to disregard the sense of dut]?-, 
you may break down entirely your moral nature, and thus 
undermine that vdiich in you is highest and noblest and best. 
And yet, friends, it is true, it has been true in the lives of 
every one of us, it has been true thousands and thousands of 
times in the history of the world, and will be for years yet to 
come, that this sense of obligation commands people to do 
things that in their nature are wrong and injurious to them- 
selves and to others. The sense of obligation, — what is it ? 
where does it come from ? You know there are those — ■ large 
numbers — over the world, perhaps a majority at the present 
time, who will tell you that this sense of obligation is the 
voice of God in the soul. And yet, if you look over the world, 
you will find yourself distracted and disturbed and troubled 



y^ The Morals of Evolution. 

to carry out a theory like that ; for the voice of the everlast- 
ing truth cannot contradict itself. And yet we find two men 
in life-long opposition to each other, both of them impelled 
by a deep-down, deathless sense of obligation. It cannot be 
the voice of the same God in the soul of both of them. We 
find some tribes where, in spite of our thought tliat one 
must feel remorse for having committed a murder, the young 
braves of the tribe feel a sense of remorse and shame and 
restlessness, feel as though they had not won the right to be 
called a brave of the tribe, until they have committed a mur- 
der. A sense of obligation commands them imperatively to 
take the life of an enemy before they can dare to look their 
f ellow-tribemen in the face. There are other nations where a 
sense of obligation commands theft. You know that almost 
everything that we call crime at the present time has been 
sometime, somewhere, commanded by the sense of obligation 
of the people. Almost everything that we call crime to-day 
sometime, somewhere, has been a religious duty. This sense 
of obligation, then, surely cannot be, in the ordinary use of 
language, the voice of God in the soul. God does not con- 
tradict himself. He does not commend murder, adultery, and 
all the crimes of the world as virtues in one nation and one 
period of the world's history, and condemn them as heinous 
offences in another. The great German philosopher Kant, 
and the transcendental school which he founded, talk about 
this sense of obligation as being what he calls a " categorical 
imperative " ; that is, if I can translate it and make you un- 
derstand it, provided I understand it myself, — which I some- 
times doubt, — he teaches that this sense of right is something 
that exists somewhere in the depths of the universe, that is 
independent of human experience, that has not sprung from 
it and does not represent it, and that yet has a right to com- 
mand the absolute, unquestioning obedience of the world. 
Now I do not think we need to go so far away as this to un- 
derstand the nature of its authority. I believe we can find a 
perfectly rational explanation of it close by, in our own na- 
tures. By asking and answering the question as to how this 



The Sense of Obligatioit. 75 

sense of obligation is transmitted from one generation to 
another, how it happens that it has passed down the centuries 
from the old time to the present and will pass on to the 
future, — by asking and answering this question, I say, I think 
we shall be able perfectly and easily to understand how much 
authority attaches to this conscience that we carry in our 
bosoms. 

This thing is to be explained by the modern law of hered- 
ity, — modern in the sense that it has been appreciated only 
in modern times, though it is no more modern as a fact than 
the law of gravitation. There is one grand thing about this 
theory of evolution : that it explains and reconciles so many 
of the old contests of the world. You know a theory is 
accepted as true when it answers to and explains the facts. 
How did it happen, for example, that the world came to 
reject the Ptolemaic theory of the universe ? Because stu- 
dents discovered all sorts of facts with regard to the planets 
and the stars that that theory did not fit into and explain ; 
and the Copernican theory of the universe stands to-day 
only because it easily explains them all. Now there has 
been a world-wide and a world-long conflict between two 
classes of thinkers, one class saying that all our knowledge 
comes from the experience of the individual ; that each new 
child is a piece of white paper, and that it is left to its life 
experience to write on this paper its character; that each 
new child is a piece of uniform plastic material that is to be 
shaped by its own individual experience. And the other 
school of thinkers have said. No : this piece of paper that 
you call white is a palimpsest written all over when the child 
begins its career ; this piece of plastic material is shaped 
already with certain tendencies that individual experience 
does not explain, — shaped as soon as the child is born. 
One of these classes of thinkers has been called experimen- 
talists ; the other, intuitionalists. Now the grand thing that 
I speak of in regard to this modern philosophy of evolution 
is that it explains and reconciles this world-long conflict. 
Experience does account for it all ; but not your experience, 



^6 The Morals of Evolution. 

nor mine alone : it is the experience of the world, the expe- 
rience of the race from the beginning. And we, each one 
of us, are born as the results of what has been in all the 
ages of the past. And so we are born with intuitions of 
right and wrong, and we go on and add something to these 
intuitions, change or take away from them by our own per- 
sonal experience, making them, perhaps, far other than they 
were when they came to us as our own personal inheritance. 
Now, then, if it is by the law of heredity that this sense of 
obligation is transmitted, what does it mean ? It means simply 
this : the race has passed through long ages of experience, 
trying this course of conduct, trying that, to find out that 
in the long run this is good and healthful, and adds to the 
welfare and happiness of man, and that this other is evil 
and hurtful, taking away from the welfare, taking away from 
the happiness of humanity. And the result of this experi- 
ence is wrought into the individual nature and inheritance of 
each one of us, so that we come into the world feeling that 
we ought to do this thing that the experience of the world 
has proved to be helpful and good, and that we ought not to 
do something that the experience of the world has proved 
to be hurtful and evil. 

The nature, then, and the extent of the authority of this 
sense of obligation we shall easily understand, if we re- 
member one distinction on which the whole matter turns. 
There are two kinds of experience which the world has gone 
through, and which we are going through to-day. One is 
the experience of the real facts, the real, vital relationships 
in which we stand to each other, to our fellow-men, to the 
world around us j and the other is the experience of the 
relation in which we suppose ourselves to stand to imagi- 
nary facts, imaginary beings, imaginary realities. Do I 
make myself clear? Suppose, for example, that I think 
there is a particular kind of God in the universe. I come 
to believe with my whole soul that God is of such and such 
character and nature, and that he demands of me certain 
things, and forbids certain other things. Now, so long as I 



TJie Sense of Obligation. JJ 

believe this, it has all the power over my life in controlling 
my actions, controlling my thoughts, in shaping my whole 
being, in marking out my career — it has, I say, all the power 
of the mightiest and grandest reality, even though there be no 
such God, and no such duty at all. My belief is the mighty 
thing that shapes me. If that belief corresponds to a reality, 
then the experiences I go through, and the intuitions that I 
transmit to posterity, are real and binding; but the beliefs 
that we inherit, the sense of obligation to do such and such 
things that we inherit from these pseudo^ these false experi- 
ences of the world, these are not binding, because they do 
not represent any reality in the nature of things. You are 
to study, then, and find out whether the sense of obligation 
that you feel corresponds to some reality ; whether the God 
you worship is a real God ; whether the law you believe in 
is a real law \ whether the relation in which you suppose 
yourself to stand is a real relation, or whether it is only an 
imagination of your ov/n mind. The things that are binding 
are the eternal verities, and the other are things to be 
sloughed off and outgrown. 

We must now pass to another question in regard to this 
sense of obligation, — the extent of it. How far does it ex- 
tend over the world, how low down beneath us does it reach ? 
How is it that this sense of obligation has widened out from 
ourselves to others ? How does a selfish life become unself- 
ish, and we become linked with all things that live and move 
on the face of the earth ? We talk to-day a great deal about 
humanity, about the love that we ought to feel toward man 
as man, about the sense of duty that binds us to the lowest 
that wear the human form. And we go even farther than 
that : we are getting to be tender toward the lower forms of 
life, toward things that even do not live at all in the sense of 
having a conscious existence. We have not to look far into 
the past before we come to a state of things very unlike this. 
If you go back to the time of Paul, you find him standing on 
Mars hill in Athens, and proclaiming j " God hath made of 
one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the 



^8 TJie Morals of Evolution. 

earth." That was a comparatively new and startling truth 
then j but it was not entirely new, for Paul himself was able 
to quote a verse from a heathen poet, one of their own, to 
confirm his own doctrine ; and he adds, One of your own 
poets has said, " We are also his offspring," — the children of 
the one God. And a Latin poet about this same time was 
able to write a verse that has become famous : " I am a man, 
and whatever is human I regard as not foreign to me." And 
yet you have only to go back to Plato, the great philosopher 
of antiquity, who is looked upon as one of the ideal men of 
the world, and you find him commending the Athenians for 
what ? Because, in relation to the Persians with whom they 
had been at war, they had distinguished themselves among 
all the peoples of Greece. How ? By, as he says, manifesting 
" a pure and heartfelt hatred to the foreign nature." There 
you find the true feeling of antiquity. And you go back far 
enough, and you find a little tribe v/ith no sense of obligation 
to anybody outside of its own family limits. They were bound 
together by ties of blood, and they considered everybody out- 
side of this little circle as a natural enemy. Did not Jesus 
himself say, in his Sermon on the Mount, " Ye have heard 
that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and 
hate thine enemy " ? It was an accepted maxim of an- 
tiquity that you were to hate foreigners. We have not quite 
outgrown that yet. How many of us can feel just the same 
toward a German or a Frenchman or an Englishman, much 
less toward a Chinaman or other Asiatic, as we feel toward 
one of our own kind ? We can hardly feel that they are men 
like us. We can hardly feel the same tingling sense of 
indignity when a wrong is committed against a foreigner that 
we feel when it is committed against one of our own neigh- 
bors or friends. 

And when the poet Cowper wrote that famous sentence of 
his, in which he declared that he would not care to count in 
his list of friends a man, however intellectual, however much 
of a gentleman, who would needlessly set foot upon a worm, 
he uttered a thought fit to make an advance in civilization, a 



The Sense of Obligation. 79 

thought that is only in the hearts of the highest, the best, the 
noblest of men as yet. We have learned at last to look 
down upon Spain, with its bull-fights, as degraded and half- 
civilized ; and yet the hunting-scenes of the gentlemen of 
England are only one step above that condition. And we, I 
think, shall have hardly risen to the noble ideal of our natures, 
until we, in our sensitive consciousness, shrink from inflicting 
the slightest pain, simply for our own amusement, on any 
creature that lives or moves or breathes. And this sense of 
obligation will reach out farther yet and lower down toward 
the inanimate world. There is something in us that responds 
to the beauty of that verse, — that sentiment of attachment 
toward what is living, indeed, but not conscious, — where the 

poet sings : — 

" Woodman, spare that tree 
Touch not a single bough ! " 

The sentiment appealed to there was indeed the memory 
of a childhood spent under that tree before it had attained 
its growth j but a perfectly sensitive, true conscience of the 
ideal gentleman of the world will shrink even from crushing 
a flower, a leaf, or a weed, out of pure wantonness. In any- 
thing that lives there is a touch of this infinite mystery, in- 
finite beauty, infinite power that is all around us, and that 
breathes and kindles in ourselves. 

How has this sense of obligation, then, passed so broadly 
over the world .f* It has come first from intelligence. So 
long as the nations of the world were not acquainted with 
each other, so long as they could dream that in some far-off 
country there was a race of men who carried their heads 
under their arms, or had only one eye in the centre of their 
foreheads, or were in some way monsters among men, you 
could not expect them to have any sense of obligation 
toward them. Intelligence first. Then next — what? An 
intellectual step, not a moral one yet, — the development and 
the making keen and vivid the power of imagination ; the 
ability to think of other people as of other selves ; the 
ability to realize their pain as though it thrilled your own 



8o TJie Morals of Evohition. 

nerves j the ability to realize their pleasure as though it 
throbbed in your own heart ; the ability to feel with them, to 
put yourselves in their places. And when intelligence and 
imagination have done their work, then the power of sym- 
pathy. Sympathy is the root of this sense of obligation. It 
is the grand power that links us with everything that lives, 
with everything that breathes, with all beauty and all life the 
wide world over. 

There are one or two other points that I must briefly 
touch. This sense of obligation — will it last forever t Has 
it something permanent in its nature, or shall we by and by 
outgrow it and leave it behind ? I believe, friends, that, just 
as fast and just as far as we get to be what we ought to 
be, the sense of obligation dies out. You hear people say 
sometimes, — and perhaps you sympathize with the saying, 
not stopping to think what it means, — Why, it is no virtue in 
me to do a certain thing: I had just as lief do it as not. It 
is no virtue for me not to follow a certain course of action, I 
have not any taste that way. It is no virtue in me not to get 
drunk ; I do not like the taste of liquor. And yet I believe 
that you will not be perfected in virtue until you have reached 
that condition where everything you do is just what you like 
to do, until the sense of obligation is forgotten and outgrown. 
Think for a moment of the physical forces of the world 
moving on by their own law, perfectly, without any sense of 
obligation. Those functions of our body that are spon- 
taneous, that are unconscious, like the beating of the heart 
and the breathing of the lungs, — those are the most perfect 
functions of all, — - most perfectly fulfil their end, and carry out 
their true nature. If a man should say in regard to his wife, 
I know I ought to love her, and I will try just as hard as I 
can to do it, you would not think that he was an ideal hus- 
band. If a mother should say of her child, I ought to 
take care of my child as v/ell as I know how, — it is hard work 
but I will try to do the best I can, — you would not think she 
was a model mother. It is when we have risen to such a 
state of heart and life that the things we ought to do are the 



The Sense of Obligation. 8 1 

things we love to do, the things our nature leaps out to the 
performance of, those that are spontaneous, that we do with- 
out thinking, it is then we are perfect. A man is not a 
good player on the piano until he can sit down with fingers 
so trained and with his whole nature so habituated to it that 
the piece will, as we say, " play itself." When you can say 
of him as Lowell says in the opening of his poem, " The 
Vision of Sir Launfal " : — 

" Over his keys the musing organist 
Beginning fitfully and far away 
First lets his fingers wander as they list " — 

when you can say of a man that, you can say that he has 
attained high excellence as an instrumental performer. So, 
then, just as fast and as far as you learn to love the things 
that you ought to do, and choose them because you love 
them, just so fast and so far Vv^ill the sense of obligation die 
out, and you will not feel obliged to do them any more, be- 
cause you want to do them. 

And there is one other last question to be asked and 
answered briefly, Is this sense of obligation enough 1 It is 
that old question concerning "mere morality." They tell us 
a great many times that mere morality is not enough : that a 
man ought to be religious. In the true sense of these words,, 
I most heartily agree with that statement. The mere intel- 
lectual perception of something as that which ought to be 
done is not enough. There is no power of motion in the 
simple intellectual perception of duty. That which moves the 
world is motion. That which moves men, always has moved 
them, always will move them, is motion with an e prefixed, — 
emotion. Emotion is the spring of life, the power that gives 
all human activity its impulse. If you have a clerk in your 
employ, and you say of him. He has a strong sense of duty, 
he feels that it is wrong to steal, and so I am sure he will 
not be guilty of it, you may feel perfect confidence in him on 
that basis. But if you could say of him, That young man 
hates and loathes and detests the idea of meanness just 



S2 The Moi^als of Evolution. 

because it is mean, of dishonesty because it is dishonest, 
and he has such a love of all that is true and noble and 
manly that he will not be honest under the impulse of a 
sense of duty, but will be honest because he loves it, you 
would feel a great deal safer about such a one than you 
would about the other. You feel that here is a higher, 
nobler state of mind. And all the grandest work of the 
world has been done under the impulse of this emotion of 
love and admiration. You take and open in your hands the 
poems of Hood, and you could pick out, even if you knew 
very little about his life, just the poems that he wrote under 
pressure of poverty and because he must earn money to keep 
want from his door, and those other poems that sprung spon- 
taneously out of the poetic nature of his heart. A painter is 
not a perfect and finished artist until he loves his work, so 
that he does not paint merely for money or fame : he paints 
because there is a picture in his soul that he must transfer to 
canvas, — from love, admiration, worship of his ideal : then 
he is a perfect artist. Now I do not say that your religion 
must be a supernatural religion, that it must be consciously 
to yourself a worship of God, — anything that the churches 
call religion. The root of the religious life is simply admira- 
tion ; love for something above you. I believe no man's life 
is perfect and no man's morals are safe until the sense of 
duty flames up into this emotion of love for an ideal far 
above him, far beyond him, that he worships, and must per- 
force, because he worships it, eternally pursue. 



SELFISHNESS AND SACRIFICE. 



The first question of the old " Shorter Catechism " is, 
" What is the chief end of man ? " and the answer, as you 
will remember, "To glorify God, and enjoy him forever." 
Let us ask this same question from the standpoint of 
modern scientific morality, and see what the reply will be. 
The chief end of man is to discover and obey the laws of 
his nature and the laws of the universe of which he is a part, 
and thus to attain the highest possible welfare and happi- 
ness for all mankind. You will notice that what theology 
calls in one word God, modern science speaks of as nature 
or the universe. Remembering that, with a proper under- 
standing of the two terms, they mean substantially the same, 
you will notice that our answer to the question as to what 
is the chief end of man is not so very unlike that of the 
old catechism. It is to glorify God by discovering and 
obeying his laws as manifested in human nature and the 
universe about us, and thus attain the highest possible wel- 
fare and the highest happiness. But who is this humanity ? 
Who is this society, this all people, that we talk about, that 
need to attain the highest welfare and the highest happi- 
ness ? Humanity is but an aggregation of individuals, and, 
from the standpoint of any particular person, humanity 
means simply himself and everybody else. If, then, hu- 
manity is to attain its highest welfare and its highest hap- 
piness, I must attain mine, and everybody else must attain 
theirs. The problem, then, as you will see very clearly, is 
to adjust the relationship between the individual and society, 
so that both the individual and society shall attain the rights, 



84 The Morals of Evolution. 

perform the duties, and gain the welfare and happiness that 
belong to them. Let us see, then, if we can discover the 
principles that underlie the relationship in which the self 
stands to society, — if we can solve the , problem of selfish- 
ness and sacrifice. 

If you go down to one of the lower forms of life, you will 
find that the most characteristic thing about it, beyond the 
fact that it is alive, is the passion of hunger. After the 
simple fact of existence comes this all-absorbing hunger, — 
a reaching out in every direction for that on which it can 
feed and by means of which it can grow. As we come 
up in the scale of life, from the animal world to man, is 
there any change in the principle? Not at all. The one 
essential characteristic of every individual on the face 
of the earth, beyond the fact that he is alive, is ex- 
pressed by that one word, hunger; only man does not 
hunger simply for bread, but he hungers for everything; 
hungers for whatever can feed any want, any department of 
his nature. His body hungers ; he hungers for the mate- 
rials of civilization; his brain hungers for truth, reaching 
out in every direction, a restless discoverer ; his heart hun- 
gers for affection, for the response of other beings to his 
own nature ; and his higher being hungers and thirsts 
eternally after 'righteousness. Hunger, then, is the root 
and is the most characteristic feature of the individual life. 
What does this mean ? It means that the primal right and 
the primal duty of each individual is that it shall exist. 
Your first duty is to live. The duty that precedes any- 
thing that you owe to wife or child, to society, to the State, 
to anything else, — the first right and the first duty of every 
individual is to exist, and to reach out in every direction 
until it has gained the means by which it can exist. For 
see, society is only an aggregate of individuals. If the 
individuals perish, where is your society? Society itself 
depends upon the existence of the individuals that compose 
it; so that if you do not seek to exist, do not seek the 
means by which you may live and grow, you are false not 



Selfishness and Sacrifice. 85 

simply to yourself, but you are false to society. This, then, 
is the first right and the first duty, — the duty that you owe 
to yourself, and, through yourself, to the world. 

Next, we are brought, as we think of it, face to face with 
the fact that the immediate motive, the spring of all human 
activity is, and must forever be, a selfish motive ; not selfish 
in the evil sense of that word, but in the sense that all 
activity springs out of the self. The influence under which 
every person in the world acts is some sort of a feeling ; and 
feeling, universal feeling, can be divided into two halves, two 
kinds, feeling of like or dislike, of attraction or aversion, of 
pleasure or pain : and no individual can by any possibility 
voluntarily act, except in the direction which, on the whole, 
it chooses. And the feeling under the impulse of which I 
act is my feeling, not yours. It may be, indeed, that the 
ultimate reason is your condition, your suffering, your 
pleasure, your wants, your desires, your pains; but until 
these things, through the power of sympathy, have started a 
feeling in my heart, I cannot voluntarily act. Every activity 
of the world then, I say, — and we cannot possibly escape 
it, — must have for its immediate motive and spring some 
feeling of the self. • 
■ There is another thing that we must notice. Society, I 
have said, is made up of the individuals that compose it. 
Each individual must count for one j and any particular indi- 
vidual has just as much right to count for one as any other 
individual. That is, to put it concretely, — so that you may 
see the extremest force of my meaning, — I am an individual, 
helping to make up the total that I call society. Now, then, 
I have just as much right to attain my highest welfare and 
happiness as you have to attain yours. It is just as impor- 
tant to the whole, taken as a whole, that I should attain my 
welfare and happiness, as that you should attain yours. 
But let us balance this by the necessary statement on the 
other side : it is just as important to the welfare of the world 
that you should attain your highest welfare and happiness 
as that I should attain mine. The point that I wish you to 



86 The Morals of Evolution. 

bear in mind is, that each individual, the self or another, 
must count for one. 

Let us now take one further step, and discuss this matter 
of selfishness. What do we mean when we call a person 
selfish in the evil sense ! What are the limits of right and 
wrong concerning this matter of myself and my relation to 
other people .'' I have a right to seek after anything on the 
face of the earth that I desire ; that can minister to me phy- 
sically, mentally, morally, spiritually; that can add, in any 
direction, to my life ; that can add to the fulness of my exist- 
ence ; that can add the least particle to my happiness. I 
have a right, I say, to seek any and all of these things, only 
with this one limitation : that I must not do it at the expense 
of the welfare or the happiness of any other creature on the 
face of the globe. That is the only limitation. And when 
you call a man selfish, in the evil sense of the word, if you stop 
to have any intelligent thought about it, you will see that 
what you mean is really this : that the person that you speak 
of as selfish is willing to get rich, is willing to gain social 
position, is willing to seek political preferment, is willing to be 
happy at the expense of the welfare and happiness of some- 
body else. If he desires any and all of these things within 
the limits of a strict and just regard for the equal rights of 
others, then he has done nothing wrong, and you have no 
right to call him selfish, in the bad sense of that word. 

Let us go on further now, and consider in some concrete 
fashion this right and duty of the individual to seek every- 
thing that is best for himself. We shall find, as you 
have found in your experience, whether you have ever 
thought it out clearly in your own minds or not, that it is 
simply impossible for us to separate the self from the society. 
Self and society are the two unexpugnable factors of the 
problem. You cannot get rid of either of them. To bring 
it right home, then, and speaking of myself as representing 
this selfish side — I do it for the sake of being concrete and 
clear — let me say that it is my duty, not simply to myself, 
but it is my duty to you, to seek everything that is best, 



Selfishness and Sacrifice. 8/ 

everything that I can attain, that shall benefit me in any 
direction. Take it, for example, on the physical and mate- 
rial plane. It is my duty, so far as possible, to be physically 
healthful and strong. If I am not, I may become a charge 
and a burden upon you, upon those around me. If I am 
diseased, I cannot keep that disease to myself. I may com- 
municate it to those about me, in every direction. It is not 
selfish for me to desire to live in as good a house as I can 
command the control of. If, for example, I build myself a fine 
and beautiful mansion close beside yours, you may, in your 
thoughtless moments, be envious if you are not able to build 
one just as fine j but, if you stop to think of it for a moment, 
you will see that I am conferring a direct, definite, and 
tangible benefit upon you. The finer house I can build, the 
more I add to the value of your property that is just next 
door. The better work I can do in any direction, then, I am 
adding not simply to my own pleasure and enjoyment; I am 
adding to yours. If I am able to become rich — not in what 
I believe to be the illegitimate way of taking without adequate 
payment the riches that somebody else already has created — 
but if I can become rich by creating myself, by adding to the 
wealth that already exists in society, then I am not taking 
away from your welfare and happiness ; I am adding to the 
sum total of the well-being of the town or city in which I 
live ; I am conferring a direct and tangible benefit upon every 
person that has to pay taxes, or that comes within the range 
of my influence. By as much, then, as I can benefit myself 
in any direction physically, by as much as I can build up 
myself, by so much I am not doing a selfish thing in the evil 
sense of the word; I am conferring a direct and tangible 
benefit upon society. It is my right, then, and it is my duty, 
to secure just as much of good in my material and physical 
life as it is possible for me to attain. 

Come up one step higher, into the intellectual life of man. 
It is my duty to be self-regarding here ; that is, in the sense of 
reaching out after the highest, deepest, broadest education 
that I can command ; to make the most of myself intellectu- 



88 The Morals of Evolittio7t. 

ally. Why ? Suppose I am ignorant : I take away from the 
value of your knowledge just to the extent to which my igno- 
rance reaches ; I destroy the field in which you are to dis- 
play your intellectual activity and achievements. As far as 
my influence goes, I put a premium upon ignorance, I in- 
crease it in society. As far as my influence goes, I tend to 
increase the amount of bigotr)^, the amount of intolerance, 
the amount of superstition, that drags society down, and that 
drags you down as a part of society. So far as I am able 
to control the movement of public affairs, I injure the family, 
I injure society, I may even endanger the State, I may over- 
throw the foundations of a rational religion. So far as my 
influence goes, I tend to do all these things. My ignorance, 
then, so far from being an expression of humility and of self- 
abnegation on my part, is a weakness and a wrong, — a wrong 
not only to myself, but a wrong to others. 

Of course you will see this principle with perfect clearness, 
when we come up into the region of morals. We never 
speak of a man as selfish when he tries to get all the moral- 
ity that he can into his own heart and his own life ; because 
we see at once, as we do not see in regard to the lower things 
of life, that by as much as he is moral, by so much is he con- 
ferring a benefit upon society. But carry it a step further, 
and take it into the region of what is ordinarily regarded 
as pure and simple selfishness. Every one of you, the total 
society with which I come in contact, has a direct and per- 
sonal interest in my being personally happy. When I seek 
happiness, then, for myself, I am not seeking something that 
is purely selfish in the evil sense of the word, and that inter- 
feres with the welfare and prosperity of the world. If I am 
happy, I cannot help communicating happiness to those 
about me, any more than the sun can help shining in the 
heavens, and sending his light out upon every planet and 
every moon that comes within the reach of his beams. If I 
am unhappy, I lower the tone of the happiness of the family 
and of the society in which I move ; I do a positive damage 
and injury to everybody that I can influence. If I am 



Selfishness and Sacrifice. 89 

happy, I can do better work, and I can do more of it : I can 
take better care of myself ; I can take better care of those 
that are dependent upon me. So then, it is my right and my 
duty, it is your right and your duty, to look after the matter 
of personal happiness ; because, as I said at first, you can- 
not separate yourself from those that are dependent upon 
you, and those that come in contact with you in every direc- 
tion ; and, if you are unhappy, you are not only taking away 
from the sum total of the happiness of society, by as much 
as you are one member of it, but you are taking away from 
the happiness of everybody about you. 

Let us now pass from this selfish side to the side of sac- 
rifice, — the rights and the claims of society, — and see how 
they are related to the life of the individual. If your train- 
ing has been like mine in this matter, you have been accus- 
tomed to hearing it preached from the pulpit, to hearing it 
talked about in society, that selfishness is the one thing that 
is natural to man. I think it is a part of the common 
creed, — until people stop a little, and think about it, — that 
everybody is selfish, a good deal more selfish than unselfish. 
Selfishness is looked upon as perfectly natural. But most of 
the churches teach that unselfishness, wherever you find it, 
is something unnatural, an indication of a supernatural grace, 
something bestowed ; that it is not a part of human nature, 
and that it does not spring naturally out of the human heart. 
And yet, if you will think about it just one moment, the. 
simple fact that we are here to-day, pleasantly and peace- 
ably related to each other, is not simply an indication, it is a 
positive demonstration, that there is more of unselfishness in 
the world than there is of selfishness. It is a positive dem- 
onstration that the self-regarding actions, in other words, are 
not so many, not so wide-spread, as are the class of activities 
that regard the rights and welfare of other people. If self- 
ishness were in the majority, then there could be no society 
existing. That is, if the power that tends to drive men 
apart — and that is what we mean by selfishness in the evil 
sense — if the power that drives men apart were more power- 



go The Morals of Evohition. 

ful than that which draws them together, then they would be 
driven apart, instead of being as they are, together. There 
are more activities, then, more thoughts, more feehngs, more 
affections, that are regardful of the rights and of the happi- 
ness of other people in society than there are of those that 
we call, in the evil sense of the word, selfish ; and this is 
proved, as I said, by the simple fact, that there is any society 
existing. 

We found that there was a great universal human passion 
at the root of selfishness, at the root of all regard for the 
individual, — this passion of hunger. We shall also find, — 
though possibly you may never have thought of it in this 
direction, — that there is a great and equally universal pas- 
sion at the root of the social life of man, at the root of all 
those activities that regard the rights and welfare and happi- 
ness of others. Unselfishness, society, springs out of the 
fact, the great universal fact, of sex, and the relations in 
which man and woman stand to each other. This universal 
hunger that we call love lies at the root, and is the main- 
spring and essential characteristic of all unselfish activity the 
wide world over. Perhaps you will have to take this thought 
home, and think about it somewhat for yourselves, before 
you will see how much it means. It means that the individ- 
ual, man or woman, standing alone in the world, is restless 
and unsatisfied j feels itself incomplete ; desires inevitably 
and desires forever to go out of itself, and to attach itself to 
some other individuality. Here is the very root of ceasing 
to be simply individual, and beginning to be social. "It is 
not good for man to be alone," wrote the old chronicler, 
thousands of years ago. This simply sets forth this great 
universal fact. And when a man and a woman have found 
their complement in each other, and a little child is born by 
that mysterious miracle that no one has ever been able to 
explain, then both find their sympathies widened to take in 
a third, and the family broadens ; and the love or the sym- 
pathy of the individual, having left itself, goes out, and ex- 
pends itself on these other selves that are grouped around 



Selfishness and Sacrifice. 91 

it, and, in so wondrous a fashion, have sprung from the indi- 
vidual life. And so this sympathy, this unselfishness, widens, 
taking in the family ; then taking in the tribe ; then taking in 
the town, the community, the city ; then taking in the State, 
then the nation, then broadening to the rim of the world. 
The whole thing starts, as I have said, from this one central 
fact, this hunger that we call love, that reaches out for some 
other individual to satisfy the incompleteness of the one. 

Now, let us pass on, to consider the law that underlies this 
great duty, this great beneficent fact of sacrifice. When is it 
right to sacrifice the self, and why is it right } The end, as we 
have seen, the great end that justifies existence, is the welfare 
and happiness of mankind. Now, then, just think for a mo- 
ment : the welfare and happiness of all the individuals compos- 
ing society being the end, suppose I sacrifice myself, I have 
sacrificed one of the individualities that make up society; 
that is, I have taken away from the welfare and the happiness 
of society just so much. Have I a right to do it t Is it a 
duty to sacrifice ? Let us think ourselves clear about this just 
a moment, for there are many people in the world — I meet 
them in every direction — who have a general notion that there 
is a virtue in the matter of self-sacrifice, no matter for whom 
or for what or under what circumstances, or whether there is 
any special call for it or not ; they have a general idea that 
there is a virtue in self-sacrifice for its own sake. This has 
sprung up, I think, for two reasons. We have found in the his- 
tory of the world, and as the result of human experience, that 
we have been obliged to sacrifice a great many times for the 
welfare of others ; and we have also been taught, from the 
beginning of the world until now, that it was a religious duty 
to sacrifice ourselves at the command of religion ; and people 
have done here, what they are doing all the time everywhere, 
for the lack of stopping to think long enough to find out what 
they are doing, — they have put the means in the place of the 
end j and because it is a virtue to sacrifice yourself for some- 
body else, because it is a duty to sacrifice the present for the 
future sometimes, because it is the duty of the individual to 



92 The Morals of Evolution. 

sacrifice himself for society, they thoughtlessly take up with 
the notion that there is some inherent virtue in the matter of 
self-sacrifice for its own sake. But, if you think of it for a 
moment, you will find that there is not the slightest. The 
end to be attained, as I have said, is the highest welfare and 
happiness of all. It may be right for me to sacrifice the 
present for the future ; it may be right for me to sacrifice my- 
self for the general welfare, or for you to sacrifice yourself for 
the general welfare ; for a man to sacrifice himself for his 
wife, for his children, for his friends, for society, for his coun- 
try, for his religion : but if you sacrifice yourself for nothing, 
instead of having done a virtuous thing, you have done a 
vicious one ; that is, you have taken away from the sum total 
of the welfare and happiness of society without a cause. I 
know men and women who, in a morbid conscientiousness, 
are continually carrying this thing so far as to make it absurd. 
I have one lady in mind now, — who has the idea that some- 
how or other, she, or somebody else will be the better for it, 
or that God will be pleased by it, — who, on particular days in 
the week, declines to eat special things that she is very fond 
of, or declines to go to certain places in which she takes great 
delight ; or is perpetually hunting up something or other that 
she can do, or not do, to make herself uncomfortable, with 
the general idea that thus she is manifesting some extraordi- 
nary kind of piety or virtue. She has no clear idea of what 
it all means, what it is all coming to in the end. Only 
she has the idea, that she is better for sacrificing herself, 
without any thought about anything beyond that. This, I 
say, instead of being a virtue is a vice. 

Sacrifice is a virtue only where, by sacrificing the pres- 
ent, or by sacrificing yourself, you are adding, in the long 
run, and all people taken into account, to the general 
sum of goodness and happiness in the world. That is the 
only reason there can be to justify the sacrifice of self 
or of anybody else. It may sometimes be necessary for the 
individual to sacrifice even life itself for society; and he 
ought to do it when he stands face to face with some crisis 



Selfishness and Sacrifice. 93, 

where he cannot refuse to stand and be true to the truth 
that has laid its hand upon him, — for we owe everything to 
society. We owe our existence, we owe our material sur- 
roundings and welfare, we owe our health, we owe our intel- 
ligence, we owe our morals, we owe the commercial relations 
of the world that enable us to carry on our business and to 
accumulate our property — we owe everything to society; 
and, when the highest welfare of society asks it, we have 
no right to decline the uttermost sacrifice. 

But it is possible to carry this matter of self-sacrifice alto- 
gether too far, even when we have the clearest ideas con- 
cerning the natural end and motive for doing it. For ex- 
ample, I have in mind, now, a friend who frequently carries 
unselfishness to such an extreme as to make it selfishness. 
What do I mean ? Why, think for a moment how pos- 
sible it is. If I am to give money away as a present, or 
as a charity to anybody, there must be somebody to take 
it. If I am to impart my knowledge, there must be some- 
body to receive the knowledge. If I am to spread broad- 
cast influences that shall result in human happiness, there 
must be somebody to accept those influences. If every- 
body should get to be perfectly unselfish, everybody anxious 
to give and nobody willing to take, why, of course there 
would be no possibility of active unselfishness any longer in 
the world. It is a mutual thing, give and take, bestow and 
receive. So that if anybody else is to be unselfish, you and 
I must be selfish sometimes ; that is, we must be willing to 
accept things from them. As I said, I have a friend who 
carries this matter so far, that she is all the time anxious 
and afraid lest she should be under obligation to somebody ; 
that is, lest somebody should have done something for her 
that she has not paid back. I call that simple selfishness. 
I enjoy giving; it is a source of delight to me. I think, 
then, I ought to give other people credit for having this 
same beneficent delight in bestowing and in making other 
people happy. That means, that I ought to be willing to 



94 The Morals of Evolution. 

give them the privilege of giving as well as to exercise that 
privilege myself \ and, in order to do that, either I or some- 
body else must be willing to receive. If you carry this 
matter, this unselfishness, too far, you defeat it, and make 
it selfishness and wrong. 

Now, then, friends, just as in treating of selfishness I said 
we cannot possibly separate the self from society, and that 
we cannot benefit ourselves without benefiting others, so 
I say in regard to society; even if we are ever so selfish, 
we cannot afford to neglect the welfare and rights of 
other people. It is a necessity, that we should think 
about and act with regard to the wants, the rights, and 
the welfare of others. Take for a moment, some comple- 
mentary illustrations to match those I used on the other 
side in discussing selfishness. Does it make no difference 
to me what the material condition of my neighbors may be t 
If my neighbors cannot support themselves, I must help 
support them ; if they are sick, they may impart to me the 
disease ; if they are living in a hovel, next door to me, they 
take away from and deface the beauty of my own residence. 
It is just as important to me that my neighbors should be 
prosperous and well off as it is that I should be prosperous 
myself. They cannot possibly, any of them, get any good 
without benefiting me by it. I may be foolishly envious, 
because I have not attained precisely the pitch of respecta- 
bility or wealth that somebody else has attained ; and yet a 
man of respectability and wealth in my neighborhood is a 
positive benefit to me, because he lifts me up, and floats me 
on a higher tide than I should otherwise attain. Were there 
no general civilization about me, my own civilization would 
be either impossible, or would count for nothing. The rich, 
the cultured, the healthful, then, cannot afford to disregard 
the poor, the ignorant, the diseased. 

And so it is essential and important to my prosperity and 
welfare, and to that of my friends and neighbors, that you 
should be intelligent. There would be no field for any intel- 
ligence that I might possess were there no intelligence on 



Selfishness and Sacrifice. 95 

the part of those around me ; they could not understand it. 
And if there is ignorance all around, superstition, bigotry, 
my intelligence may be shut up, and limited to a very narrow- 
sphere ; it would be restricted on every hand, and might be 
even swamped by the floods of ignorance and bigotry that 
were about me. And am I not interested in the moral 
condition of my fellow-men ? Can I afford to fold my arms 
and say, I am righteous, and I do not care whether anybody 
else is or not? The immorality that is around me consti- 
tutes a malarial and infectious atmosphere that I must 
breathe, and in which moral health and moral happiness can 
no more exist than a plant can grow under an exhausted 
receiver, or in air that is poisonous to its very life. And if 
there is criminality on the part of my fellow-men, it taxes and 
cripples and hurts and hinders me in every direction. It is 
absolutely essential, then, to my highest and best welfare 
and happiness that society should also attain its highest 
welfare and happiness, thus giving me a proper surrounding 
and soil in which I can grow. It is essential, even, that 
society about me should be happy, if I am to be happy. No 
man who is sympathetic and thoughtful can live happily in 
the midst of surrounding squalor, misery, and wrong. It 
touches and chills and thrills him in every direction with 
throbs of pain. And if to escape this sympathetic sorrow 
with the sorrows of others, I blunt and harden my sensibil- 
ities, I may indeed escape certain pangs of pain ; but I cut 
off at the same time all the sources of sympathetic pleasure 
that must come in at the same avenues. I am no wiser 
than as though, in order to escape seeing some ugly spot in 
the landscape, I should put out my eyes, and thus inca- 
pacitate myself for seeing the beauty of the earth and of 
the heavens. We cannot, then, I say, separate between the 
rights and the duties, the welfare and the happiness of the 
self and of others ; they are linked indissolubly together ; 
they go up or they go down together. I cannot be unselfish 
to the extent of injuring myself without injuring you ; I can- 
not be selfish to the extent of injuring you without injury to 



96 The Morals of Evohitioii. 

me. We stand hand in hand, and must march on brothers 
and sisters, or else we must all be crippled and halt together. 

And now, for my brief closing word, I wish to call your 
attention to two principles that issue from this discussion, 
and on which the whole problem rests. The first thing, 
the one thing essential to the welfare of the individual and 
of society, the one thing on which all other things rest, is 
not love, not unselfishness even; it is justice, — the thing 
that we need first and above all things else. We need it 
before we need charity, we need it before we need pity, we 
need it before we need love, we need it before we need 
beneficence, — we need justice; justice in the household 
between husband and wife; justice in the household be- 
tween parent and child ; justice in society ; justice between 
the different classes that make up society, between the rich 
and the poor, between the learned and the ignorant, between 
the capitalist and the laborer ; justice between the different 
religious organizations that exist, and have an equal right to 
exist ; justice between the citizen and his ruler. This is the 
one grand crying need of the world, the one thing to adjust 
the relations of the individual to society. And I emphasize 
this, because there are thousands of men in the churches, 
men everywhere, claiming to be pitiful, with words of love, 
with words of beneficence, and with words of brotherhood 
on their lips, who are telling us that we must love our neigh- 
bors as ourselves, who are talking charity, and who are giving 
money — there are hundreds and thousands, I say, like this, 
who have not yet learned the first essential principles of 
justice. They talk love, while they ought to be studying 
what is fair and equal. 

That first, that always, that everywhere ! Then, after that, 
the other principle : — the free play, the spontaneous activity 
of love and beneficence ; the pouring out of your thought, 
of your character, of your time, of your money, without 
thinking whether it is going to be paid back or not; the 
giving and doing all fine and sweet and true and beautiful 
things, because, possessing those qualities, you cannot help 



Selfishness and Sacrifice. 97 

it. A flower cannot be beautiful without imparting the de- 
light of that beauty to every competent beholder. A flower 
cannot be fragrant without scattering its fragrance on every 
breeze, and delighting every passer-by. A diamond cannot 
be brilliant without flashing its beauty and its wealth on 
every side. The sun cannot shine without scattering his 
rays broadcast in every direction, through all heavens, to 
fall upon every wandering planet and most distant moon. 
And so man cannot be what he ought to be without this 
free, spontaneous activity, — the natural outplay in all direc- 
tions of those things that in him are highest and finest and 
sweetest. 

And you will see right here^ that, looked at from this 
standpoint, there cannot possibly be any intelligent conflict 
between selfishness and sacrifice. That which is for the best 
good of everybody must be, in the long run, for the best 
good of the individual \ and that which is for the best good 
of the individual must be for the benefit of society. For 
those qualities, those characteristics, that make you a man 
high, sweet, pure, and true, that constitute your own perfec- 
tion, it is those that make you of use and value to the 
society of which you are a single member There is, then, 
no conflict, no antagonism. Only learn to establish equity 
between man and man, only give free play to the beneficent 
and beautiful impulses of your being, and there shall be no 
more talk of self or sacrifice, but only a free play and activ- 
ity of human nature, culminating in the kingdom of God, of 
truth, and of love. 



THE RELATIVITY OF DUTY. 



We sometimes talk about things as they are in them- 
selves, and then about them as they appear to us to be. 
This is all right and allowable, if we only understand 
what we mean ; but, as a matter of simple fact, we do not 
know what anything is in itself, per se. We do not know 
what an atom of sand from the street is in itself. We do 
not know what a flower is in itself, or a tree, or a star. All 
our knowledge, in other words, is relative — relative to the 
faculties that we possess for perceiving them, the sense by 
which we come into contact with them, the avenues through 
which they report themselves to us. Let me take a simple 
illustration, that you may see how universal this truth is, and 
how far-reaching. Suppose I have here in my hand a violin 
— a violin as I can describe it now, having all my five senses ; 
that is, being able to come at it from five different directions. 
I can report that it is something hard to my touch, of a par- 
ticular, definite shape. I can strike it, and hear a sound, and 
report that it is hollow, my past experience enabling me to 
say that that kind of sound always means that the thing 
giving it out is hollow within. I can touch its strings with 
my fingers, and thus learn that a violin is something that is 
capable of giving forth different kinds and qualities of tones. 
If it be made, as it generally is, of some fragrant kind of 
wood, I can smell it, and so discover that it has another 
quality that we call odor. I can look at it, and see its 
color ; and I can even touch it with my tongue, and find out 



The Relativity of Duty. 99 

the taste either of the wood itself or of the varnish that 
covers it. That is, it reports itself as something different 
to every one of my senses. Now, suppose I had only the 
sense of touch : so far as my knowledge is concerned, a 
violin would be only something hard, having a particular 
shape. Suppose I had only the sense of sight : I should 
be able to perceive its outline and its color; and a violin 
would be only something having shape and color. Suppose 
I had only the sense of hearing: a violin would be some- 
thing having no shape, color, or hardness at all, but only 
sound. Suppose I had only the sense of taste: then the 
violin would be only something that had about it a resinous 
taste, or a taste like varnish, or a taste like cedar or spruce, 
or whatever the wood of which it was composed. Thus we 
come at anything that you choose to select as an illustration, 
from stars down to street-dust. We reach them through the 
functions of these senses that are capable of perceiving their 
various qualities ; and they are to us according to these per- 
ceptions which we bring to the investigation of them. 

Now, it is perfectly conceivable that we might have more 
than five senses, just as it is conceivable that we might have 
less than five, as we know a great many persons do. If we 
had six senses or seven or ten, the addition of these percep- 
tive powers might give us a new universe. That is, the uni- 
verse to us, to-day, is what it is because it is related thus to 
the different perceptive faculties and powers with which v/e 
come to its investigation. There is nothing that is such, in 
itself. Water of such a temperature as would freeze us 
and put an end to our existence is perfectly comfortable to 
creatures that are made to live and swim in it. We some- 
times talk about sugar as being sweet. There is no inherent 
quality of sweetness in sugar. The taste of sugar is purely 
relative to our tasting capacity. Sometimes, when you are 
sick, sugar is not sweet, vinegar is not sour ; and nothing has 
the taste that it has when you are well. You have changed 
the quality of these things, then, so far as they appear to you, 
simply by changing the condition of your own system. And 



100 The Morals of Evolution. 

so of beauty. Our ideals of beauty are not those that have 
always been held, or that are held, to-day, all the world over. 
The fair-skinned beauty of Boston would not be regarded 
as beautiful in the land of the Zulus or in China. Types of 
beauty are relative to the perceptive faculties of the people 
that have been trained to see and to regard them. And so — 
I have given you illustrations enough — all our knowledge of 
the universe is relative knowledge, not absolute. We cannot 
penetrate anything, and find out what it is in itself. People 
sometimes think that it is a very discouraging statement to 
make about God, that he is unsearchable, — that we cannot 
find him out, that we cannot seek the place of his abode, 
and tell what kind of a being he is in his inmost nature. 
There is nothing more discouraging in that direction than 
there is in any other. I cannot find out what you are in 
your inmost nature ; I cannot find out what a tree is in its 
inmost nature ; I cannot find out what anything is in its 
inmost nature. I simply know things as they are manifested 
to me j and the kind of knowledge I get depends upon the 
condition of every one of my faculties of perception. 

All this is only introductory to the statement, that precisely 
the same thing holds true in regard to the matter of duty. 
Duty, also, is not absolute. There is no absolute, unchang- 
ing, eternal duty in the universe, so far as actions are 
concerned. Must we, then, say that there is nothing eternal 
about it, that there is nothing absolute about it, that there 
is nothing final about it? No, we need say nothing of 
the kind. We must simply remember a distinction which 
is all-important for the clearness of our thought. The under- 
lying principle of .duty is absolute, eternal, unchanging. 
And what is that underlying principle .? That which I have 
had occasion to state to you several times during the 
progress of these discourses. Every man, every woman, 
every child, is under eternal obligation, so far as able, to do 
those things which are for the highest welfare and happiness 
of all mankind. There is the principle, — a principle that 
never relaxes, a principle that is never broken, a principle 



The Relativity of Duty. loi 

that is never changed, a principle that apphes to the lowest 
form of life as well as to the highest ; that applies to the first 
crude beginning of civilization, and applies equally to the 
last and highest that we can conceive. That is the eternal 
part of duty. But when you come to the matter of the practi- 
cal application of it, it is infinitely varied ; for we must per- 
petually, in all the changed circumstances and conditions of 
our life, ask ourselves the question : " Just now, just here, 
what is for the highest welfare and happiness of myself and 
of all mankind .'* " There is a question that can receive an 
infinity of answers, and yet the principle remain unchanged 
forever. It is for lack of marking clearly this intellectual dis- 
crimination that so many people have been able to say : 
" Why, duty is anything, and duty is everything. It is never 
twice the same ; it is not the same in different climes j it is 
not the same among different people ; it is not the same in 
different degrees of civilization : and so there is nothing per- 
manent about duty j it is a mere matter of convention and 
fancy." I say it is for the lack of clear discrimination that 
people have been able to blunder into a statement so wide 
of the truth as this. The principle is eternal \ the applica- 
tions are infinitely varied. 

Now, then, let us pass to consider some of the principal 
ways in which this matter of duty appears to us as relative. 
And, in the first place, it is relative to man in general. This 
is an important fundamental statement, that I am briefly tc> 
dispose of, making it as short but as clear to you as I can. 
Duty is not something that existed before there were any 
creatures in the universe, something outside of all human 
beings, or human relationships. Duty begins when sentient 
creatures come into contact with each other. Duty, then, 
to-day, is what it is because men, women, and children are 
what they are. If, for example, we could conceive of a uni- 
verse where all the present conditions of life could be 
changed, if we could find a world where cold would not 
freeze people, and where heat would not burn them ; if we 
could find a world where those things that now hurt people 



I02 The Morals of Evolution 

would be good for them ; where it was a benefit to a man to 
steal from him and swindle him in business ; where those 
things that would make him sick now would then make him 
well j where those things that now give him pain would min- 
ister to his pleasure, — if, I say, we could conceive of a 
different kind of man and a different kind of world for men, 
women, and children to live in, then we should have alto- 
gether another kind of duty, another kind of right and wrong : 
because it is the eternal duty of all to do that which minis- 
ters to the welfare and happiness of man. And if, I say, our 
circumstances were so changed that something else would 
minister to our welfare and happiness, then duty would 
change. In saying this, do we admit any disintegrating 
principle into this matter of right and wrong, so that the 
foundations of morality are liable, by and by, to be worn 
away and crumbled into dust ? By no means. Until human- 
ity changes, and becomes a different kind of humanity from 
what it is to-day, duty will not change. When humanity 
does change, if ever, then duty not only will change, but it 
ought to change. 

Not only, then, is duty relative to man because he is what 
he is and is circumstanced as he is, but it is also relative to 
the different grades of the advancing civilization of man. 
This you will find to be a very important distinction and one 
to which I ask your earnest, careful attention ; and you will 
find we have not outgrown applications of it yet. What do 
I mean ? Why, when we look over the history of the world, 
if it be for the first time, we are rather startled to find that 
almost everything that we now consider virtue has sometime 
been disregarded, — not only by individuals, but by a whole 
race, by a whole civilization, by a whole religion ! We find 
that those things that we now regard as vices have been 
practised universally by whole tribes, whole cities; and. we 
are startled also to find that the people were comparatively 
happy and comfortable under those circumstances ; and that, 
instead of being in process of disintegration and decay, they 
are actually in a comparatively healthy condition of growth, 



The Relativity of Duty. I03 

and are looking on towards a higher and better condition. 
For example, to make myself perfectly clear, as we go back 
into the past, we find, at times, grades of civilization and 
conditions of the people when superstition of the wildest 
kind, when despotism of the most iron sort, when war, 
merciless and bloody, when polygamy, when slavery, have all 
been regarded as right and good. And let me say — I will 
explain so that I trust you will not misunderstand me — let 
me say that in regard to these all, — superstition, despotism, 
war, polygamy, slavery, — at that time, under the circum- 
stances, they were comparatively good. They are not to be 
looked at and regarded as we regard them from the stand- 
point that we occupy, to-day. They were good. They were 
not a sign, then, of degradation ; they were a sign of progress. 
Let me see if I can make you understand clearly and defi- 
nitely just what I mean. I hold an acorn in my hand : the 
inner meat and seed are covered with a hard, impervious 
shell. This shell is necessary in the growth of the acorn, 
necessary to preserve and protect it so long as it remains an 
acorn ; and so, for the acorn, it is good. But if this is ever 
to be planted, and to become an oak, the shell must be burst 
and broken ; it must be sloughed off and left behind, to go 
back to decay, and thus help on the nourishment of the 
higher life. A man who is worth only one hundred dollars 
is looked upon by a millionnaire as in comparative poverty ; 
and he is. But if the man has never before owned a dollar 
in his life, and has come up from a lower condition, and for 
the first time holds in his hand one hundred dollars that he 
can call his own, compared with his previous condition he 
is rich. 

This whole matter, then, is relative, comparative. Now 
let me tell you what I mean. We go back to the primal 
condition of men, and we find them wild and degraded and 
barbaric, — hordes on the very verge of humanity, so that we 
can hardly tell whether they are brute or human. Now, for 
their progress, one of the very first conditions is, that they 
shall become organized, — compacted together in some kind 



I04 TJie Morals of Evolution. 

of society ; that there shall be some bond that will bind and 
hold them together so that they can act, not as scattered 
and dissevered individuals, but as a larger unit. Supersti- 
tion once helped to bring about just this condition of things : 
the fear of the ancestral spirit; trembling in the presence 
of the shade of the dead chief ; not daring to do anything 
except that which was supposed to be his will ; the neces- 
sity of keeping up the worship of these ancestors — this 
was once the central idea of the family. It bound the 
family together; it bound the tribe together; it helped, 
among other forces, to create the family and the tribe. 
When first arose the despot, — one man who towered so 
much above his fellows that they began to think that he 
must be a descendant of the gods, and to call him hero, 
demigod, and after his death to worship him, — when, I say, 
one man towered thus above his fellows, atid gained such 
wide-spread power and influence that he was able to sweep 
whole masses of men into compacted communities and 
armies, — to organize them, — he helped man onward and 
upward one step in his civilization. What does polygamy 
mean, when you approach it, not from our standpoint, but 
by going down, and, from a standpoint away below it, 
coming up to it? For you must remember that polygamy 
is not the lowest social position that the world has ever 
occupied. It is comparatively above the barbaric, and is 
a step onward in the progress of man. At first, there was 
wild and brutal promiscuity, — not even the semblance of 
family, not even the semblance of wifehood or legal moth- 
erhood. When, emerging from a condition like that, you 
come up to polygamy, and find, though a man have five, 
fifty, or a hundred wives, a recognition of the propriety of 
some sort of family relation, society wins a grand step in 
advance in the civilization of man. So that, I say, when you 
look at polygamy from away beyond and below it, looking 
at it out of the depths of human barbarism, it was away up 
above the then condition of humanity, as much as the per- 
fect purity of the home is above the average condition of 



The Relativity of Dtity. 105 

our great cities, to-day. And slavery j was that also once a 
good? We have been accustomed to think that it is the 
most gigantic of crimes, — this depriving a human being of 
his rights, of the control of his body, of the control of his 
wife and children, of the control of his earnings ; and, from 
our standpoint, it is a gigantic crime. John Wesley did not 
use any too strong language about it, when he said it was 
"the sum of all villanies." There is hardly a crim^e or 
wrong that can be mentioned that does not find natural 
shelter under the shadow of the black wings of slavery. 
And yet there was a time in the history of the world when 
slavery was a blessing, — when slavery was an advancing 
step in civilization. Think for a moment. It was at 
first the universal custom of tribes, in their wars, to mas- 
sacre indiscriminately all the prisoners that they took 
captive ; they did not know what else to do with them ; 
they had no idea of humanity. By and by there came into 
their hearts something more of human tenderness, some- 
thing of a regard for the rights and the lives of their fellow- 
men ; and, instead of putting them to death or letting them 
go free — for they did not dare then to let them go free, and 
it would have been unsafe to let them go free, to come back 
and fight them again — when the people, then, had con- 
quered an alien tribe, instead of putting them indiscrimi- 
nately to death, they took them captive, and carried them 
home, and held them in slavery. This, then, was something 
better than indiscriminate murder, and it was a step higher 
in advancing civilization. 

Slavery, then, was once a good. It is a crime, to-day, and 
an unspeakable wrong, because it represents a lower type of 
civilization that we have outgrown. There is a lesson here, 
it seems to me, for us to learn concerning the condition of 
the South to-day and our own recent history. I do not 
think that Garrison was any too bitter in his denunciations 
of the evils of slavery. I think that he may have been 
sometimes too bitter, and that we to-day may be sometimes 
too bitter, in our estimate of the conscious sin and wrong of 



io6 The Morals of Evohitioiz. 

the people who were implicated in that institution. Only 
remember that it is just a few years ago when the North, a 
large part of it, believed in it just as much as the South. 
Among those that made themselves distinguished in our 
pre-revolutionary times, there was no man greater than 
Jonathan Edwards. He was intellectually so gigantic in 
his stature that he was one of the first Americans tall 
enough to be seen across the ocean, and recognized as a 
great man in Europe, — one of the keenest and subtlest 
metaph}' sicians of his time. And he was not a cruel man ; 
he was not a hard man \ he was not a man without a con- 
science, — one of the most conscientious, earnest, religious 
souls of his age. And yet Jonathan Edwards went down 
to Connecticut and bought a negro boy, took him behind 
him on his horse, and carried him home to Northampton; 
and, when one of his deacons remonstrated with him on 
the subject, he preached a sermon in defence of slavery. I 
speak of this simply to illustrate how people, thrown in the 
midst of certain systems and certain ideas, although they 
may be doing wrong, may not be consciously doing wrong; 
and there is a world-wide difference between the two. One 
is wrong ; the other is a sin. A man is doing wrong when 
he is breaking any law of his nature, or law of the relation- 
ships in which he ought to stand to his fellows ; he is 
sinning only when he is doing this consciously and pur- 
posely. You may do wrong under the inspiration of your 
conscience just as easily as under the inspiration of a 
burning hatred ; but you cannot sin under the inspiration 
of your conscience ; you can only do that when you are 
acting against your conscience. 

Right and wrong, then, are relative to the different grades 
of civilization. But once more : taking it home to us, to-day, 
right and wTong are relative to the circumstances in which 
we stand, — relative to our ability ; relative to our oppor- 
tunity ; relative to our intelligence ; relative to our moral 
and spiritual insight. For example, as giving you an illus- 
tration of what I mean, and letting you follow it out for your- 



The Relativity of Duty. 107 

selves : I know mothers who carry around with them a bur- 
dened conscience, because they do not help on this work of 
benevolence, and do not help on that j because they are not 
able to enter into society, and assume, as they say, their 
share of the social burden. Perhaps they are physically 
weak. Perhaps they are kept at home by ties which they 
dare not disregard or break. And yet they go about, I say, 
burdened, carrying a conscience that accuses them of wrong ; 
and they say, " I know I ought to do this, and I ought to do 
that; but I cannot." Duty is relative, — relative to your 
ability. And when you say, " I ought, but I cannot," then 
one or the other of the terms of that proposition is untrue. 
If you ought, then you can ; if you cannot, then you ought 
not. There never was a case in the history of the world 
where a person ought and could not. It may sometimes be 
a difficult matter to decide whether you can or not, or which 
way the balance should turn ; but duty never points in two 
directions at the same time. And so here, again, duty is 
relative to conditions and circumstances. Precisely the same 
act which is a crime under one condition may be a virtue in 
another. Suppose, for example, I seize by the hair of the 
head a beautiful little fair-faced child of yours. I do it in a 
fit of anger. I receive and I deserve your execration. Sup- 
pose we are out in a boat together, and she has fallen over the 
side, and I seize her just as she is sinking, — seize her more 
roughly than I did in the other case, and save her life ; I 
receive your thanks, your tender gratitude. And yet it is 
precisely the same external muscular act. A man may kill 
another, and be guilty of premeditated murder ; he may kill 
him, and be guilty only of manslaughter ; he may kill him, 
and it be simply an accident ; he may kill him in war, or 
where some grand principle is involved, and it be an act of 
heroism that shall make his name famous among the bene- 
factors of his kind through all time. A deed, then, the 
quality of a deed, is relative to the conditions and circum- 
stances under which it is performed. There is no single 
deed in the world that may not be bad or good according to 



io8 The Morals of Evolution. 

the circumstances and the motives that inspire it. And so 
in regard to this matter of moral insight. When I have seen 
some high duty, when it has revealed itself to my eyes, and I 
know that I ought to do it, because I see that it is a good 
thing and ought to be done, no matter if nobody else sees it, 
the duty has laid its hand upon me, and I have no right to 
excuse myself on account of the lower moral life and tone of ' 
society about me. It is relative to my moral insight, and I 
ought to do my best, grandest, and highest. 

I must pass, now, to another division of my subject, and 
give what time remains to the discussion of the relative 
importance of certain classes of duties ; for this is a matter, 
I think, that needs and deserves our most careful attention. 
In the first place, let me say, that, other things being equal, 
the duty that lies nearest to you is the one that you ought 
first to give your attention to. Suppose I am a surgeon on 
the field of battle, and there has a man fallen right by my 
side, and over there are a hundred or a thousand ; which 
shall I attend to first ? Life is dear to them all ; all of them 
have friends, perhaps wife and children, dependent upon 
them. I must take the first that comes to hand, then that 
which lies over yonder. Take it in regard to our social 
relations ; which shall I do, look after my wife and children 
first, or look after the general welfare of society ? Many and 
many a time does a conflict, or an apparent conflict, of duty 
like this come up. You remember, perhaps, that picture of 
Mr. Dickens' in " Bleak House," where he describes the 
household arrangements and affairs of Mrs. Jellyby, — how the 
children are left running loosely and wildly over the house, 
in rags, in dirt, neglected, uneducated, unkempt, while the 
mother is devoting herself, day after day, week after week, to 
the work of sending the gospel to foreign parts. I remember 
a case like this, not in a novel, but in real life. When I was 
living at the West, there was a lady who was a very zealous 
religionist. She was one of those who believe in perfection, 
and she was one of those who supposed that she had reached 
it ; and a large part of the time she was engaged in attend- 



The Relativity of Duty. 109 

ing perfectionist meetings and discussing the subject, and 
trying to get all her friends to be as perfect as she was. 
And I remember, one day, a friend of mine met her little 
boy, out at the knee and elbow, in the street, looking very 
dilapidated. He inquired where his mother was, and found 
that she was attending a perfectionist meeting somewhere. 
And then the boy gave a sigh, and said, " And when papa 
comes home, and does not find the dinner ready, you just 
ought to hear him swear ! " And I seriously question which 
was doing the most evil, she in attending her perfectionist 
meetings under those circumstances, or he in swearing about 
it. She was neglecting the first duty that was laid upon her, 
the duty of taking care of those of her own household, — ■ 
those around her feet, those that looked to her for care 
and guidance. 

And so I say of a man : his first duty, before he is gen- 
erous, before he helps send the gospel anywhere over the 
world, before he helps any charitable association, before he 
does anything beyond the limits of his own doorstep, is 
to look after wife and child. He has entered into these 
sacred associations, taken upon himself these sacred obliga- 
tions ; and these come first, before generosity or charity have 
any claim. There may indeed come a conflict that shall 
even supersede the rights and the claims of those that are 
dearest. When John Rogers went to the stake, and the wife 
and the children followed him to see him burn, which was 
it then? Was it duty for John Rogers to look after wife 
and child, or to burn ? When Sir Thomas More stood in 
prison, and his wife came to him and clung about his feet, 
and begged him with tears to recant and go home, which 
was duty then ? There may come a time when the claims 
of humanity, the claims of truth, shall supersede all lesser 
and lower claims. When that time does come, then let us 
turn our faces Godward, and put all the world behind our 
backs. This is the spirit expressed in the lines of that old 
song where the lover says to the one that he loves, when he 



no The Morals of Evolution. 

leaves her and goes to the wars to fight for his country and 
his God : — 

I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
Loved I not honor more. 

There may come times when a man, in order to be true 
to the lower wants and welfare of those about him, must be 
false to all that is highest, deepest, and noblest in his own 
being; then he must stand up and be true. 

And there is another apparent conflict, — the relative 
importance of duties to man and duties to God. Which 
have the first claim on us ? It has been held from the foun- 
dation of the world, almost, that duty to God must be first. 
Duty to God among the barbaric peoples of the primeval 
v/orld was worship of dead men instead of living ones ; it 
was satisfying the claims of deceased ancestors. So that 
then, perhaps, it was hard to decide as to which had the 
highest claim, the living or the dead. But now which.? 
What does Jesus say .? Let us look at a little New Testa- 
ment morality, although I think it is still very far from being 
acted upon and carried out. Jesus rebukes, with all the 
bitterness of his burning words, that recreant son who 
instead of taking care of father and mother put his property 
beyond his reach by calling it "corban," — that is, sacred to 
deity, — and then saying, " Father, I would like to take care 
of you and mother, I would like to look after your wants ; but 
all the property there is for doing it is ' corban,' it is sacred 
to God, and I cannot take it for the sake of looking after 
human welfare." And so you find in different directions, 
all over the world, how the rights of men have been 
trampled on in the service of God. There have been periods 
in history when every year kings and priests slaughtered men 
by the hundreds and thousands to please the deities ; when 
they did not slaughter them, but ground them down, crushed 
them, taxed them, made them work and slave and labor for 
the building of gorgeous temples, and the support of magnifi- 
cent services and rituals, — long, wailing, dreary periods, 
when human rights, human welfare, human prosperity, 



The Relativity of Duty, in 

human happiness, was nowhere of any account, but all the 
priesthoods and the kings were ver}^ religious, serving God, 
but neglecting man. 

Which is the highest claim ? Go back again to the New 
Testament for an illustration. You remember how Jesus 
says, you bring a gift here to the temple altar, and you 
remember there that there is some difficulty between you and 
one of your friends. Do not dare, says Jesus, to go in with 
this offering to God, so long as this difficulty remains with 
your brother. Go and adjust matters with him first, then 
come and be religious afterwards. That is the doctrine of 
Jesus. Let us think of it for a moment, to see whether it is 
possible for us to approach God while neglecting humanity. 
People seem to think that they can leave human rights and 
human welfare neglected all around them \ that they can be 
unjust, refuse to pay their debts, swindle those that are labor- 
ing for them, — that they can break every law of humanity, 
and still be very religious. I tell you there is an adamantine 
wall as high as heaven, as deep as the abyss, as wide as the 
diameter of space between a man like that and God ; and 
there is one little narrow door, and only one, through which 
he can go to reach the other side of that wall where God 
abides ; and over that door is written for inscription, " If 
you would find God, first be in right relation to your fellow- 
men." Where is God, that we can find him while out of 
relation to our fellows ? What is he, that we can bring an 
offering to him that he will care for, except service to our 
fellows ? Did he not say, even by the lips of the old prophet, 
thousands of years ago, I do not care for your thousands 
of rams or your ten thousand rivers of oil : I do not care for 
your incense, — it is an abomination to me ; what I do care for 
is, that you shall " do justly and love mercy and walk humbly 
with your God " ? And yet people have gone on still, in 
spite of these grand words echoing and ringing in their ears, 
neglecting their duty to their fellow-men and very devoutly 
coming to church, reading the Bible, doing this thing, 
doing that, doing a thousand other things, well, and perhaps 



112 The Morals of Evolution. 

useful and good, in their place, but false and wrong when 
used as a substitute for this that is higher. 

How can we approach unto God ? Where is he ? I tell 
you that God, though he be in the heavens, cannot be 
served by you there. What can you do that he cares for ? 
Would you bring him an offering ? The cattle on a thou-' 
sand hills are his. If he were hungry, he would not tell you. 
You need not bring him food to eat, or raiment to wear. 
What does he care whether you pray facing the East or 
facing the West ? What does he care whether you are robed 
in a surplice, or in a black frock coat ? What does he care 
whether you pray on your knees or on your feet ? What 
does he care for the swinging of a censer in which sweet 
smelling spices are consumed ? All these things, if they be 
made to take the place of righteousness and truth and ser- 
vice to your fellow-men, are trash and rubbish. Only those 
things that help man are of any use to God. Where is God t 
He is where a man needs something ; he is where a man is 
ignorant that needs teaching ; he is where a man is wounded, 
and needs to be bound up ; he is where a man is in prison 
who needs to get free j he is where a man is depraved and 
degraded, and needs to be lifted up towards heaven. God 
is anywhere, where there is human need ; he is an)rwhere, 
where you can help your fellow-men. And if you attempt to 
find him anywhere else, you will only choose a phantom of 
your own imagination. If you attempt to find God, then, 
do not dare to pass over the prostrate body, or trample down 
the rights, of a fellow-man. Until you are in right relation 
with your neighbors, until you have done your best to be 
just and generous and faithful and true, in the relations of 
life, do not dare to think that you can come to God, and 
leave man bleeding behind you. 

And now let us look at the relative importance of the 
duties that you owe to this present life, and that you owe 
to the next ; which is the most important thing, as a duty, 
that you look after this world, or that you look after heaven ? 
And here let me say frankly, if it be true that there is this 



The Relativity of Duty, 1 1 3 

great eternity outlying us on every hand, stretching on for- 
ever and ever, then of course that is unspeakably more 
important than this little brief life. If it be true that hap- 
piness in that eternity depends on something else besides 
your being righteous and true here, then it is unspeakably 
more important that you look after that world than that 
you look after this. If it be true that only by neglecting 
all the duties of life and becoming a hermit or a St. Simeon 
Stylites on his pillar, that only in this way can you pur- 
chase heaven, then you ought all to be hermits, or stand 
on pillars. Eternity is unspeakably more valuable than 
time. If it be true that only by accepting such a creed, 
and being obedient to such a priesthood, a man can gain 
heaven, then every persecution, every bloody torture, every 
unspeakable cruelty of the Catholic Church has been more 
than justified. What are these little passing pains and 
tortures and trials and sorrows of an hour compared with 
eternity ? And this is the way man has reasoned. On the 
basis of a groundless supposition, that heaven can only be 
purchased after this fashion have these gigantic cruelties 
been enacted. But who has spoken out of the eternities to 
tell us that the endless life depends on something besides 
character ; that it depends on something besides obedience 
to the laws of God ; that it depends on something besides 
being pure and true ? Who has spoken with the author- 
itative word of God to tell us any such thing as this t All 
that we know about God, about the past history of the 
world, about man, about the future, — all that we know 
utters and echoes and reechoes only one grand principle, — 
the same God everywhere, the same laws everywhere, the 
same love, the same truth, the same life everywhere. And 
it is an absurdity, an infamous contradiction in the nature 
of things, to assert that the way to make the happiness of 
heaven is a course of conduct that would turn this earth 
into a hell. Heaven : its pillars are lifted up as the sup- 
port of justice and truth; its foundations are laid in ever- 
lasting righteousness ; its principles are obedience to the 



114 The Morals of Evohition. 

laws of the love and the life of God. And the way — if 
there be a future — for us to find it, the way for us to pre- 
pare for it, the way for us to build the walls of the city of 
heaven, is for us to lay the foundations of righteousness, 
and raise the walls of truth and of purity right here. 

He who proposes to find the next world by neglecting this, 
or thinks he does, only deludes himself by a fancy and a 
dream. We know very little about the future. All we do 
know about God, all we do know of righteousness and truth 
and happiness — all are here — God manifested here in his 
present laws : God's love in human hearts, God's pity, God's 
justice, God's happiness and delight and joy, in these simple 
loving human relationships. All we do know, then, I say, 
teaches us with perpetually renewed and reiterated emphasis, 
that the way for us to look after the next world is to look 
after this. It is not for us, then, to trouble about heaven; 
it is for us to build heaven here. 



Real and Conventional Virtues and Vices. 



As we look over the past history of the world, and survey 
the present condition of human affairs, we are struck by this 
fact : that men and women, under a sense of obligation, have 
not only done things that were useful, things that were help- 
ful, things that were good, but that under this same sense of 
obligation they have also done, and declared that everybody 
else ought to do, a great many things that, at the least, were 
useless. They have gone further than that ; they have done 
things that were positively harmful, injurious, and evilj all 
under this same sense of obligation. Along with the neces- 
sary habits and customs and courses of conduct of men, 
there has sprung up this undergrowth of weeds — sprung 
from the soil of human fancy, speculation, superstition, acci- 
dent, custom, — a whole harvest of manners and thoughts 
that sometimes seem ready to choke out the life from the 
things that are vital, the things that are essential to the wel- 
fare of men. For men not only say that you ought to do 
certain things, but they say concerning another whole class 
of human actions, that you ought not ^ to do them; laying 
their restriction upon things that do not touch real, vital 
human concerns at all. Thus they create conventional 
virtues and conventional vices. And there have been times 
in human history — and those times, in some parts of the 
world at least, exist to-day — wherein men have laid more 
stress on the conventional virtues than they have upon 
real ones; wherein they have condemned with severer 
penalties the conventional vices than they have those that 
were real. For example, as setting forth simply just what 



1 16 The Morals of Evohition. 

I mean : I suppose every sane man in the world holds that 
belief stands in some vital relation to conduct. Thus has 
arisen a sense of the necessity of creeds, written or un- 
written; for creeds exist not only in religion, they exist in 
agriculture, in banking, in the law, everywhere. There has 
sprung up, then, I say, this sense of the necessity of belief, 
of right belief ; because generally men carry out that which 
they really believe into their conduct ; though they do not 
always. And this sense of the importance of belief as being 
a necessary condition to right conduct has grown so strong 
in the thought and the heart of the world that many a time 
that which is only a condition has usurped the place and 
province of the thing sought ; and men who failed in con- 
duct have been applauded if their confession was thought 
accurate, and men who have failed in the supposed accuracy 
of their convictions have been condemned and outcast though 
their conduct were faultless. This simply as illustrating what 
I mean. There are whole classes of these conventionalisms 
corresponding to the different ranges of human activity. I 
wish to draw from society, from the political life of the world, 
and the religious life, some illustrations of what I mean ; and 
then we will go on and find out how they have grown up, and 
what we ought to do with them. 

If men and women are to live together in society, there are 
certain courses of conduct which they must follow, on which 
the very existence and prosperity of society depend, — that 
is, men must not kill each other ; they must not steal from 
each other ; they must not lie to and about each other ; they 
must not injure each other in property, character, or estate. 
This is the ideal. If everybody did what some people do — 
break all these laws — there would be no society possible. 
There is society existing, just because the majority of people 
comply with these necessary conditions which are the very 
foundation stones on which society rests. These, and such 
as these, are the real social virtues ; but not only are these 
regarded as important, not only are penalties visited more or 
less severe upon the breaches of these laws, but there have 



Real and Conventional Virtues and Vices. 117 

sprung up in all departments of society, habits, and cus- 
toms, — right enough in themselves, if men only understand 
what they are, and keep them in their proper places, — but 
which are in no way essential to the real welfare of man ; 
and many a time these rise to such a height in the estima- 
tion of people as to overtop and overwhelm the real virtues 
on which society rests. 

Let me give you some very simple illustrations ; and, the 
simpler and more frivolous they are, the better they will do 
for my purpose, because they will illustrate all the better, 
all the more forcibly, this tendency of mankind. Let us 
take it, for example, in regard to the mere matter of cloth- 
ing. Clothing of some sort, if men and women are to live 
together in the world, is essential ^- essential to decency 
of life, to the health of the body, to the welfare of all. 
This, then, is the one real thing that is necessary j but the 
peculiar kind of fabric out of which the clothing is con- 
structed, the pattern after which it is made, the times of 
the day when particular articles of apparel shall be worn, 
the occasions when people are required to dress so and 
so, — these, of course, you will recognize at once as mere 
conventionalisms. And yet, how many people are there 
in the city of Boston who look upon these things, the mere 
conventionalisms of dress, as a great deal more important 
than the necessity of dress itself ! They sacrifice health, 
convenience, a thousand real things to the fancies and 
whims of the milliners, of the dressmakers, of the fash- 
ionable leaders of the time. Not only that ; they sacri- 
fice deeper and higher things than these. I trust there are 
not a great many women, — and yet there are some, — 
of whom the one that Mr. Emerson speaks is typical, who 
said that the sense of being perfectly well dressed gave her 
a peace of mind and a calmness of soul that it was beyond 
the power of religious consolation to bestow. There are not 
a great many, I trust, — and yet there are some men of whom 
the famous English "Beau" Brummel is a type, — who cared 
but little about keeping his character free from " spot or 



1 1 8 The Morals of Evolution. 

wrinkle or any such thing," who cared little as to the ques- 
tion whether the associates with whom he mingled day 
by day were spotted and wrinkled in their character, but 
who staked his reputation and the happiness of his life 
on never having his necktie spotted or wrinkled. He de- 
voted the energies of his life to faultless attire ; so that it 
was not an uncommon thing for his body servant to take 
down the back stairs a whole huge basket full of white neck- 
ties, saying, "These are our failures." He had wrinkled 
them somewhere, so that he would not be seen in his fashion- 
able society with them. How many people are there in the 
city of Boston who would cut an acquaintance on account of 
the clothing they wore ; if they should fall, as we say, in the 
social scale so as not to be able to appear fashionably 
enough; when they would not think of cutting them for a 
vice, for an unkindness, for neglecting to meet their bills; 
would not think of cutting them for purposely failing in busi- 
ness, and paying ten cents on a dollar ; would perhaps court 
their society if they succeeded in it, and were able to dress 
and appear more fashionably than ever ! 

Take it, again, in the matter of food and drink. Of 
course, if we are to live, we must eat; but what we 
must eat at particular times, the ordering of our table, 
the arrangement of the different courses — all these things, 
of course, you recognize at once as mere conventionalities. 
And yet there are people in all the highest society, as it is 
called, who would associate with a lady who was a backbiter, 
who was a slanderer, who was known to be mean arid con- 
temptible in character, and yet who would cut another lady 
who should commit the indiscretion, the fashionable crime, 
of pouring her tea out into her saucer. There are men and 
women who will associate with people whose characters are 
blackened and disreputable, but who would not invite to 
their tables a man who took his soup from the end instead 
of the side of his spoon, or who should commit the horrible 
indiscretion of putting his knife into his mouth. 

And so in regard to homes and houses in which men live. 



Real and Co7tventional Virtues and Vices. 119 

A house is a necessity to shelter us from cold ; but there is 
no special law of necessity connected with the question as 
to the material of which the house shall be built, as to how 
many stories or rooms it may contain, as to the particular 
spot of earth, east or west, north or south, on which it shall 
be located. And yet I know young ladies in this city, who 
think so much of the particular spot of earth — its location — 
where the precious lump of clay of which they are made 
shall sit down to its food, or where it shall lie down to its 
sleep, who, I say, lay so much stress upon this question, that 
seems, when you consider it, mere nonsense and folly, that 
as soon as they have removed half a mile from the place 
where they were accustomed years ago to reside, they do 
not any longer know their acquaintances who continue 
vulgarly to eat and sleep upon the old spot. This, of course, 
is mere conventionalism. It is flippant, foolish, contemptible 
conventionalism. And yet it is something that gets into 
the air, and infects us all more or less, and must, in spite of 
ourselves, unless we stop and think, and weigh these things. 
And then the social conventionalisms as to what consti- 
tutes education. Education, of course, means the drawing 
out and development of our faculties, so that we can deal 
with this great problem of life. To live first, and then to live 
nobly, — that is the end of education ; that is the only end that 
justifies it. And yet people abuse that noble word culture, 
which means education in this sense, until they come to 
think and to feel that only those persons are educated who 
can torment a musical instrument and torment the people 
that have to listen to them; who can speak a little bad 
French or bad German ; or who have been transported in a 
ship across the ocean and brought back again, — nothing else ; 
who have done this thing, done that thing; who have got 
certain facts into their heads, or have been put through cer- 
tain courses of discipline without any regard whatever as to 
the good that is to result to society by it ; and they treat as 
uneducated and unworthy of their patronizing society and 
notice people a thousand times their stature in all that is 



120 The Morals of Evolution. 

manly or womanly, because, forsooth, they lack some one of 
these misnamed accomplishments. 

When we come into the political world, we find precisely 
the same thing there. What is the object of government? 
It is to protect individuals in their relations to each other, so 
that they shall not encroach on each other's rights ; so that, 
consistently with this, they shall have the largest possible 
opportunity of action to acquire for themselves whatever may 
seem to them to be desirable. This is the object of govern- 
-ment j and the best government is the one that does this the 
best. And yet we here in America pride and plume our- 
selves perpetually on our republican form of government, 
which we have a perfect right to do, so far as that goes : 
we talk scornfully about the "effete monarchies" of Europe, 
which, so far as that goes, we have a perfect right to do; 
but we do both of these things, and at the same time rest 
contented under abuses, under evils, which perhaps other 
people do not bear so patiently as we. That is, we put the 
form of our government in the place of the object for which 
governments are created, and pride ourselves on our form, 
without stopping to think whether it is to accomplish the 
end in view or not : no wiser than a farmer would be who 
should pride himself upon his improved machinery, his 
ploughs, his planters, his reapers, and his threshers, and all 
the time not raise half as good a crop as the more faithful 
worker on the next farm who lacked them all. These things 
are good, if they accomplish their end : the end is good, if it 
be accomplished in any manner ; and it is better than the 
means, however fine and beautiful the means may be. 

And then there is another point in this political conven- 
tionalism of ours to which I think we here in America, 
at the present time, need specially to have our atten- 
tion called ! Political parties are a necessity in a country 
like ours ; I do not see how it would be possible for us to 
carry on our government without them. But what is a party? 
Any party that has a right to exist is simply a collection of 
people, having certain common principles, not only as a plat- 



Real and Co7tventio7ial Virtues and Vices. 121 

form, but certain common aims that they believe will ultimate 
in the public good. These principles they seek to realize in 
legislation. But how is it with us to-day ? How many men 
are there connected with either the one party or the other, 
who stand by it through thick and through thin, not because 
of the principles underlying it, not because of any grand aims 
that that party has specially in view, and that they believe 
cannot be reached so well in any other way ? They stand by 
it because they did stand by it fifteen years ago, or last year. 
They stand by it because they have become proud of the 
name, or because they have learned to hate and blacken 
everything and everybody that goes by the other name. 
They stand by it even when it forsakes its principles. 
When it surrenders the very object for which it exists, still 
they stand by the party; and they carry it as far as that 
famous man whose saying has been quoted a great many 
times, — and which represents the outcome of the principle, 
— who said he would vote for the regular nominee of 
the party, even if he were the devil. This is party conven- 
tionalism; and when allowed to stand in the way of that 
thing, good government, for which parties and all forms 
exist, it becomes, not a virtue, but a vice, a crime; it be- 
comes treason to the country, treason to the welfare of men. 
Your business, then, and your duty, is not to cling to a party 
through thick and thin. Cling to principles through thick 
and thin ; and, if the party does not stand by a principle, let 
it go to wreck. 

When we pass from the social and the political wor^d into 
the religious, we find such a field and wide range of con- 
ventionalisms that one knows hardly where to begin or 
where to leave off. Take it in regard to our conception of 
God — God the Infinite One, who cannot be compassed by 
the thought, who cannot be put into any words — what is 
our highest ideal of Him t It is simply an ideal of the best 
goodness, of the truest wisdom, of the mightiest power, that 
we are capable of conceiving; that is what we mean when 
we say, God. And we know perfectly well, if we stop and 



122 The Morals of Evolution. 

think a moment, that our ideal is not he; it is simply our 
best thought of him; and we know, that this may be im- 
proved and enlarged a thousand fold, to infinitude if it were 
possible, and yet hardly express him. And yet nations, relig- 
ions, churches, get their peculiar little pet ideal of God, no 
more real, no more worthy of reverence than a stone idol or 
a wooden block ; and that is the thing that men must rever- 
ence and bow down to, whatever the reality of their religious 
life ; and if a man dare to doubt that thing to be God, if 
he dare doubt their thought of him, then he is infidel and 
atheist. The conventional precedes the divine. 

And so in regard to times. When shall God be wor- 
shipped? One religion says one day, another religion says 
another day; one says morning, another noon, another 
evening. If we should regard all the conventionalisms of 
the world, there would be no time left for anything else but 
scrupulous devotion to somebody's worship and somebody's 
god. And yet people get so full of the idea that it is 
necessary to have some time for worship — as of course it 
is, if you are ever going to worship at all — that they fix 
upon their peculiar stated time, and make it more important 
than the worship itself ; until there needs the voice of a liber- 
ating Jesus to come and ring in the ears of all the world a 
principle which is applicable in all directions, — " The Sab- 
bath — the worship time — was made for man, and not man 
for the Sabbath." 

And so in regard to churches, whether it shall be mosque 
or cathedral or conventicle or meeting-house : in regard to 
the clothing of the ministry, whether it shall be orange, like 
the Buddhist; whether it shall be black, like the Anglican 
minister's robe ; whether it shall be glaring and gorgeous, like 
that of the ritualist or the Catholic — all these things: the 
form of worship, whether you stand or kneel or prostrate 
yourself: the words, whether extempore or written, English 
or Latin : the rites and ceremonies, whether there shall be 
Lord's supper, whether there shall be baptism ; if there be 
baptism, whether it shall be plunging beneath the water, or 



Real and Conventional Vwtues and Vices. 123 

the touching of a few drops upon the brow. All these things 
and a thousand more, what are they? Mere religious con- 
ventionalisms, not necessarily attached anywhere to the heart 
of true, sincere, and reverent worship. And the man who 
worships — if it be under the open sky at night with the stars 
for chandeliers, if it be not in the "dim religious light" 
of the cathedral, but the dim but quite as religious light of 
the aisles of the forest, — the man who worships, admires, 
loves something above him, aspires toward it, he is the 
religious man. And all these other things, if they help him, 
are good ; if they do not, they are useless. If they are 
placed in the stead of the real religiousness of his nature, 
then they are positive evil and hinderance, to be brushed 
out of the way. 

Now how is it, friends, that these things — the social, the 
political, and the religious conventionalisms — have come to 
such a growth as they have ? What is the working of the 
human mind that leads us perpetually to lay such an empha- 
sis on a thing that is not of the slightest consequence, and 
leads us to overlook a thousand things that are exceedingly 
important? Men come to the position occupied by the 
priesthood to whom Jesus spoke when he said: "Ye pay 
tithe of mint and anise and cumin, and have omitted the 
weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, and faith." Hov/ 
does all this come about ? I will group the ways under two 
or three general heads, so as to guide your thinking ; not to 
exhaust the theme. 

And first, there is a perpetual tendency in the mind of 
people to put the means toward the accomplishment of an 
end in the place of the end itself that they desire to reach. 
How many illustrations there are of this ! Take it right here 
in this audience, to-day; take it in every civilized centre 
of the world, and in the uncivilized regions of the world as 
well, in this mere matter of money-getting. What do people 
want money for ? You want money to furnish food, to fur- 
nish clothes, to build your houses, to provide for the highest 
wants of the world. And you knov/ perfectly well how high 



124 The Morals of Evohuion. 

I estimate this necessity. Civilization would be impossible, 
if it were not for money. And yet, how many men are there 
that keep their heads balanced and level all their lives through' 
as to the meaning of money and the relation it bears to 
the things they desire to gain ! Money is only a means to 
an end, to the welfare of man. A man starts out in business, 
and says : Now I must make a certain amount of money, and 
I must lay by enough so that, if anything happens to me, my 
wife and child will be secure and their welfare provided 
for. That is, it is the welfare and happiness of his wife and 
children that is the first thing he thinks of in trying to make 
money. And yet there are hundreds and thousands of men 
who get so insane over the idea of accumulation that they 
sacrifice the happiness, they sacrifice the comfort, they sacri- 
fice the welfare, of their wife and children, for whom they 
are making it, through the desire to make more ; putting the 
means perpetually in the place of the end. As though a 
man, seeing it was necessary to the raising of a crop of 
wheat that he should plough his field, should keep on plough- 
ing all summer, and forget to sow the grain ! As if we 
should say here in this city of Boston, Now if we are to bring 
Cochituate water here to supply all our homes, why, we must 
lay conduits and pipes all the way from Framingham to 
Boston ; and then we must lay them through all our streets 
and in all our houses, and arrange the plumbing and the 
faucets so that the water shall come straight to our hand 
with its life-giving power and its cleansing qualities whenever 
we need. This is the means for bringing it here. Suppose 
a man who had all this machinery skilfully developed and 
completely arranged should still have no water, priding him 
self only on keeping this in perfect order; suppose he 
should sneer at his next door neighbor, who, more anxious 
for the water than the plumbing, if the pipes did not work, 
should take a bucket and go to a spring and fetch the essen- 
tial thing into his home j suppose he should say to him : 
Why, that is all absurdity and nonsense : that won't do you 
any good ; it did not come through the true catholic means 



Real and Co7ive7itio7ial Virttics and Vices. 125 

of supply ! That is what people are doing everywhere in 
society, in education, in political life, in religion, — bowing 
down to and worshipping the means and forgetting all about 
the end, or postponing it indefinitely. 

There is another way. Certain courses of conduct having 
been found useful at a certain time, people keep on under tb.e 
law of habit — a necessary and yet a very thoughtless kind 
of law — after the meaning has all dropped out of the things 
in which they are engaged. Long before any metal was 
invented, or there were any metal knives in existence, the 
barbaric nations of the world used a stone knife for the 
purpose of sacrificing at the altar. They used a stone knife 
because it was the best they had, all they had. But, after 
bronze and iron were discovered, they still went on using 
the stone knife in sacrificing. They used the better in- 
strument everywhere else, but they had come so to rever- 
ence this which was good and useful, the best they had 
once, that they thought it a kind of sacrilege to substitute 
anything, even though it were unspeakably better, in its 
place. And so of religious matters all the world over. 
Because a certain thing was good once, at one stage of 
civilization, men keep on practising it forever, when the 
meaning has all dropped out ; and for the life of them, if 
you should ask them, they could not tell you where it came 
from, when it was first used, why it was first used, or why 
they keep on using it to-day. As though an eagle, able to 
reflect on the past history of its life, and thinking within 
himself that his shell was once absolutely essential to his 
existence, or an exceedingly important thing in the course 
of his development up to a certain point, should, even after 
he had chipped it, broken away, and escaped, go back and 
attach it to himself, and carry it about v/ith him forever ! 
Shells are good things, so long as they are needed ; when 
we are able to get along without them, they are bad things. 
A man is obliged to use crutches when he is lame ; but he 
would not keep on using crutches after he is able to walk by 
himself. And yet socially, politically, religiously, nine-tenths 



1 26 The Morals of Evohitio7z. 

of the world to-day is still going on crutches, and thinking 
that they would fall prostrate if they should be taken away 
from them ; though they are perfectly sound, strong, and able 
to go alone. 

And then there is another reason, a very important one, 
a thing that runs through all the life of the past; and 
that is the establishment between certain courses of con- 
duct, certain forms of words, or certain ceremonies, — 
the establishment between these and certain results that 
are desired, of a connection that is not real, but only 
magical. Until within a few years, the whole world was 
one broad scene and network of magic. Magic every- 
where. Did you ever stop to think what the underlying 
principle of magic is .'* I must tell you, so that you can 
see how it connects itself with my thought. Magic springs 
out of the idea that a certain coincidence, or a certain 
fanciful resemblance, or a mere connection in thought, may 
stand in a real causal relation to some end or result that 
is desired. To put it tangibly; I was at the theatre, the 
other day, and saw Shakespeare's " Much Ado About Noth- 
ing." Beatrice, in that play, you will remember, is explain- 
ing the fact that she is so vivacious in her disposition, so full 
of buoyancy and animal spirit, so ready to laugh, so ready 
to play back and forth with words. And what is her expla- 
nation of it ? If she had said that her father or mother, or 
grandfather or grandmother, or some of her ancestors had 
possessed a disposition like this, and had transmitted it, she 
would have given a reason in accordance with the essential law 
of cause and effect, that we could have respected and under- 
stood. But the reason she does give is one drawn from the 
old doctrines of astrology. She says that, on the night when 
she was born, " a star danced." That is the reason why she 
is always ready to dance, always voluble, vivacious, and full 
of life and spirit. 

That is an illustration of what was all over Europe only a 
few years ago. For example, in medicine, the mandrake, a 
little plant that grows with forked roots, and is supposed 



Real and Conventional Virtues a7id Vices. 127 

in its general outline to resemble man, was considered to 
have all sorts of magical connections with human life, to 
be powerful for good or evil in the hands of those who 
came into possession of it. A yellow flower, just because 
it was yellow, was supposed to be an infallible cure for the 
jaundice, because the jaundice turned the complexion of the 
invalid yellow. So they established all these fanciful, unreal 
relations as to cause and effect, between this thing and that 
thing. They were not real, they were only imaginary ; and 
these influences infected religion, and are all through religion 
to-day. It was a piece of magic when the king of England 
was supposed to be able to cure scrofula with his touch. 
There is no connection between the touch of the king's hand 
and the cure of scrofula, only a purely imaginary, magical 
connection — no real connection of cause and effect. You 
remember the story in the Bible of the dead body that was 
let down into the grave and touched the bones of the old 
prophet that had been buried there before him, and which by 
that touch was suddenly raised to life. You know that the 
history of Europe is all full of the magical efficacy of the 
bones of the saints. And what is very strange, we find that 
sometimes these bones, supposed to be the bones of saints 
that were producing such wondrous cures, were discovered 
by modern anatomists to be those of a donkey, or some 
other animal ; and then this magical power suddenly ceased. 
This connection of supposed cause and effect, then, in 
magic is no connection at all, — simply an imaginary one. 
Take it in the grandest service of cathedrals here in America 
and in Europe, to-day. A priest pronounces a special for- 
mula over a piece of bread, and it suddenly becomes the 
body and the blood of Almighty God, in spite of the fact 
that we are taught to say that " God is a Spirit." What is 
the connection between the form of words and such tremen- 
dous changes as this ? What is the connection between the 
robe you wear or the posture in which you pray and the 
real results that you seek? These things, friends, are 
magic j they are not religion, they are magic ; they are not 



128 The Morals of Evolution. 

science, they are magic ; they are not even common-sense, 
they are absurdity itself. 

The thing we need, to-day, then, friends, in social life, in 
political life, in the religious life, is to study and think until 
we have found out the real virtues, what they are ; the real 
things on the performance of which hangs human welfare. 
What are the things I ought to do to build myself up, body, 
mind, and soul t What are the things I ought to do really 
to help you ? These are the virtues, and these are the only 
virtues, of the world, in the real use of that word. But we 
are to discover, on the other hand, what are the real things 
that injure men and women, that take away from the fulness 
of their life, — that hinder their growth, their development, 
their happiness. We are to find out what these are, and be 
careful that we do not these things ; not that we do not tres- 
pass on some fastidious conventionalism of some fastidious 
section of society. All well enough, if you please, to obey 
the conventionalisms of the world, if you only remember that 
they are conventionalisms. Pay tithe of mint, anise, and 
cumin, if you please, but do not make these a substitute 
for justice, mercy, and faith. The thing we are to do, then, 
is to be sure that we keep the real laws of life, that we 
obey the real commands of natural morality, that we do 
those things that stand in real relation to the welfare of 
the world. 

And then next, beyond that, — keeping if you choose the 
conventionalisms of the world, — do not dare, as you value 
your soul, your higher life, do not dare to place the conven- 
tionalism above the reality ; do not dare to substitute a con- 
ventional virtue for a real one ; do not dare to obey a 
conventionalism at the cost of disobeying a reality. Do not 
lie because society demands it, or it is politic. All this is 
real injury to your own soul, and the soul of your fellow-man. 
Do not value yourself so much on politeness and courtesy, 
while, at the same time, you are willing to injure or ruin the 
characters of those to whom you are courteous and polite* 



Real and Conventional Virtues and Vices. 1 29 

Break a conventionalism always, rather than a reality; but 
dare not break a reality for the sake of a conventionalism. 

And then, lastly, remember that our conceptions of what 
we ought to do to-day are entirely related to the conditions 
of to-day ; and that if to-morrow discovers a larger, deeper 
truth, that which was true to-day may be a conventionalism 
to-morrow. Be ready, then, to study more deeply the condi- 
tions on which human welfare depends ; be ready to know 
any truer, any larger, any higher ideal ; be ready to recognize 
anything that may be revealed to you, that shall tell more 
and more for the advancement of man. Believe in the 
reality you can see to-day, but believe in a larger, a grander, 
a deeper, higher, broader reality for to-morrow ; and be ready 
to sacrifice always that which you believe in now and see to 
be good now for that which shall be better in the time to 
come. For, as Tennyson expresses it in " Locksley Hall " - 

" Thro* the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day. 

******* ***** 

Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, 

And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns. 

************ 

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range I 
Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.'* 



MORALS AND KNOWLEDGE. 



If a man is to make a journey, at least two things are 
requisite, — that he should know his course of travel, and that 
he should have an inclination to pursue that course. If a 
general is to attack a fortress, he must understand the art of 
siege and war ; and he must have the will to carry out his 
knowledge, and make it practical and effective. So, if men 
are to walk through this world in ways that we call right 
instead of wrong, two things at least are essential, — that 
they should know what right is, and that they should be 
inclined to pursue it. 

There has been a great diversity of opinion as to the rela- 
tive importance of these two essential things. There are, 
for example, many persons at present, among the leaders and 
thinkers of the world, who tell us that the one thing that is 
needed is education. The hope of the world, they say, is in 
the direction of the school-house and the university. If we 
can only get men to think and to study, that is all that is 
required. And they buttress this statement with very sub- 
stantial and plausible statistics. They point to the fact that 
the criminal class, in almost every civilized nation of the 
world, is recruited from the ranks of the ignorant. They 
point to the fact that no one can dispute, that those nations 
that are the most illiterate are the ones that present to us 
the longest catalogue of crimes. But, on the other hand, 
there is another class of men who tell us that we all 
know, every day, a great deal better than we do. They 
point now and then to a case such as we were familiar with 
only a few years ago, of a man in prison for the crime of 
murder, who passed his leisure time in solving important 



Morals a7td Knowledge. 131 

problems in mathematics, and in reading the Greek and 
Latin classics in the original tongues. They tell us that 
there are thousands of men who persistently, day by day 
and year by year, pursue courses of action that are destruc- 
tive to themselves and injurious to society, when they at 
least have the means at hand of knowing better. And 
they would go so far as to say that they do know better ; and 
in one sense we should be obliged to admit the statement. 

We are met, then, at the outset of our subject, by these 
two apparently antagonistic classes of opinion. That we may 
clear our own thought, and know really what we are dealing 
with, let us go down beneath the surface, if we can, and find 
some of the principles that relate to the bearing which knowl- 
edge has upon character and conduct. 

And, in the first place, I must remark that knowledge is 
not an end in itself ; it is not a good in itself : it is only, like 
most other things, a means to an end. What is the end for 
which we live } I have had occasion to tell you more than 
once, during the progress of this course of lectures, that the 
end is human well-being, through recognition of and obedi- 
ence to the laws of nature in ourselves and the universe 
about us, — to the end that this well-being may result in 
human happiness now and always. This is the end. Knowl- 
edge, then, is only a means to an end, is not a good in itself. 
But, on the other hand, knowledge, possessing no character 
of itself, no intrinsic virtue or vice, may become, and fre- 
quently does, a positive evil and injury to him who possesses 
it, and to the society in which he lives and moves. There 
is a knowledge of evil courses of action as well as of good. 
There is a knowledge that leads people not upward, but 
downward j not toward the harmonies of peace and heaven, 
but toward the discords of darkness and wrong. We say of 
a young man, for example, that he "knows the town." What 
do we mean ? We mean that he possesses a knowledge that 
is injurious to him and to all those over whom he has any 
influence. A pilot may have a knowledge of the coast and 
the rocks and shoals at the mouth of a harbor ; and he may 



132 The Morals of Evohition. 

use it to guide a ship safely past its perils, and bring it into 
port with all its treasure of goods and of human lives. 
Another man may have a knowledge of these same ways of 
the coast, of the rocks and shoals ; and he may use it as a 
wrecker, kindling false lights for beacons, and so destroy 
treasure and life for his own selfish and evil gains. 

Knowledge, again, may be evil when it is pursued simply 
for its own sake, selfishly. How many are there that per- 
ceive the principle underlying this? Fathers and mothers, 
for example, finding their boy or their girl of an evening 
over a book, generally, without looking into the book to see 
what it is, feel that the child is well employed, engaged in 
that which must result in good. And yet, until you know 
what the book is and what the child will do with the knowl- 
edge that it gains from the book, that which you regard as 
a good, as a pleasant and profitable way of spending time, 
may be only mischievous and evil. And there is many a 
man who is looked upon as studious, who devotes his life to 
research, who is yet of no practical value to the world, but 
might as well be devoted to any other course of selfish 
action. A man who is simply a bookworm, who buries 
himself in his study, who reads for nothing but for the 
sake of reading, who studies for nothing but the sake of 
studying, what better is he than any other hermit? What 
better is he than the man who in the Middle Ages retired to 
a cave, and sat contemplating a skull and meditating on the 
vanity of human life ? The life is useless, not devoted to 
any human, helpful end. 

Another may pursue knowledge with the pride of a con- 
scious dilettante, simply setting himself up as knowing this 
thing and knowing that, and proud of his knowledge; and 
he may carry it so far as to take him out of sympathy with 
his fellow-men. And, when he carries knowledge in this 
direction, it becomes not a good, but a positive evil. Any 
knowledge which severs you from your kind instead of bring- 
ing you into closer contact and sympathy, any knowledge 
which kindles your sense of pride and superiority, and 



Morals and Knowledge. 133 

makes you feel that you are above the common herd, that 
you cannot stoop to come into contact with and to help, 
inspire, stimulate, and lift up your fellow-men, is evil knowl- 
edge, is the knowledge not of an angel, but of Mephis- 
topheles. Knowledge should make those that are learned 
like elder brothers toward those that are younger and less 
able to mark out the way for their feet ; should only 
stimulate them to be guides and helpers of those that have 
not been lifted up to ranges of life as high as their own. 

There is another kind of knowledge that is useless or 
worse; and that is knowledge — however honestly, however 
earnestly pursued, with however strong a desire to make it 
helpful to one's fellow-men — of things that in their very 
nature are divorced from the realities of life. I must make 
myself clear by an illustration. I know a prominent theologian, 
one of the strongest thinkers of the age, who told a friend of 
mine some years ago that he did not waste his time reading 
any book written since the seventeenth century. That is 
all very well for a man who proposes to live in the seven- 
teenth century j but do you not see how it necessarily cuts 
him off from the vital life of the world, that is not in the 
seventeenth century, but in the nineteenth.? A man may 
pursue Middle Age scholasticism through all its range, its 
infinite wilderness of ramification, and study it all his life ; 
but it may not touch practically the great problems that the 
world is trjdng to solve to-day ; and, so pursued, it is useless 
knowledge, or worse than useless. One who is burying him- 
self in these theories, fine-spun and high-flown, but that yet 
do not touch the real life of man to-day, might as well, so 
far as the world is concerned, be buried in private dissipa- 
tion, in the selfish pursuit of money, be doing any mean, 
sordid, evil thing. He is out of harmony with the life of his 
time, and his character counts for nothing in helping on the 
world. 

And yet, on the other hand, after notmg all these consid- 
erations, that you may see both sides of the problem, it still 
remains true that knowledge real knowledge of the uni- 



1 34 The Morals of Evohition. 

verse, — which is a knowledge of God; real knowledge of 
men, of human histor}^, of the path by which the race has 
come up to its present condition ; of the principles that 
underlie right action, of the direction in which we must walk 
in order to attain man's highest welfare in the future, — I say 
this, which is real, true knowledge, is absolutely essential to 
moral action on the part of the man who proposes to live 
in the midst of this rushing, throbbing world, — to live not as 
a dead weight in it, dragging it down ; not as one merely 
borne along on its current and tide, but as a helper, one 
whose life shall count for at least a little in making the 
world better. Knowledge, I say, true knowledge is essential 
to right moral action. A man may indeed, as I have just 
intimated, drift along with the current, without knowing much 
as to where he is going. He may, like one of a flock of 
sheep, simply follow the lead and the drift of those about 
him, and, on the whole, pursue a career of right conduct, a 
healthy course of action, without knowing anything about it. 
But it does not invalidate the statement I have made j for 
it is somebody's knowledge that directs the current of the 
stream, the tendency of the flock, if it be going in the right 
direction. 

And one other consideration we must grant. A man is 
two-sided in regard to his moral or immoral action. There 
is a subjective side and an objective, as we say. There is a 
side of motive and intention ; and there is another side, the 
external course of action that he is pursuing. A man may 
do wrong, and yet maintain his moral integrity so long as he 
intends to do right. His motives may be true, his intentions 
may be good, and yet he may be a life-long mischief-maker, 
a positive and perpetual injury to those that are about him. 
There has been no more gigantic power of destruction from 
the beginning of the world until the present time than this 
same " Meant-well-but-didn't-know." It was " Meant-well " 
who, with good intentions, became the pilot of a ship and 
ran it on the rocks. It was " Meant-well " who, a few years 
ago, in Western Massachusetts built a reservoir that he 



Morals and Knowledge, 135 

thought would hold the waters, but which burst beneath their 
pressure, and destroyed the whole valley, devasted village 
after village, ruined property and human life. He meant 
well, but he was ignorant. It was " Meant-well " who built 
the bridge at Angola ; and yet, in spite of his good intentions, 
the train plunged through, and darkened a hundred homes. 
It was " Meant-v/ell " who constructed that great mill at Law- 
rence j but not understanding the laws of the strength of 
materials, not dealing fairly and truly by those eternal forces 
of nature to which every man must first or last give an 
account, the mill was crushed beneath the weight of its 
enginery and its human freight, and came down one shrieking 
mass of ruin. It was " Meant-well " who, in the person of 
Philip II. of Spain, pursued such a disastrous career. I 
believe there has been no ruler in all history who has sat 
on any throne of whom it could be more truly said that he 
meant well. He was the incarnation of a certain kind of con- 
science, and he pursued his whole career under the inspira- 
tion and guidance of what he thought to be religion, the will 
of God. And yet it is said that he never smiled in his life 
except when he heard of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. 
His reign was one of the most conscientious and best inten- 
tioned, one of the most religious, and at the same time the 
most immoral and execrable that Europe has ever seen. It 
is not enough, then, to mean well. There must be intelli- 
gence. You must know that this thing you purpose to do is 
in accordance with the laws of your own nature and the laws 
of your fellow-men. If you undertake anything touching the 
welfare of society, touching the foundation principles of 
government, touching the verities of religion, before it is safe 
for you to lay your hand to these mighty forces, you must 
know that the thing you purpose to do shall be for good and 
not for evil. Intelligence, then, is all-important. 

And now, friends, we approach the central and most diffi- 
cult part of our whole theme. It involves no less a question, 
that each one of us ought to ask ourselves, than this : What 
shall I do, in which direction shall I look, toward what end 



136 The Morals of Evolution. 

shall I work, in order that I may help on and help upward 
the world ? Is there in human nature any force, any motive 
power on which we can rely, so that, when we have made 
men know what they ought to do, we can count upon their 
doing it? Must we direct our thought and our endeavor 
toward education or toward this matter of inclination, of 
which I spoke at the first ? Which most needs our care ? 
which must we nourish, which seek to develop ? I believe, 
though I expect I shall make some statements that will 
give you hesitation in your thought, if not lead you to posi- 
tive dissent, — I believe that there is such a power. I be- 
lieve there is a permanent, indwelling motive in humanity, 
taken as a whole and in the long-run, that we can count on 
to propel the world in the right direction, just as fast and 
as far as we are able to persuade the world what is right. 
What is this power? What is this motive force? It is 
nothing more nor less than that best-abused motive of all 
the world, regard for self. We may preach and we may 
talk and we may labor until the end of time, but I do not 
believe we can radically change human nature from what it 
has been from the first until now. In the nature of things, — 
see if my statement be not true, — every man, every woman, 
every child, must, if they are free to act, choose that thing 
which at the time, in their circumstances, and for them, 
seems to be good. No man ever did choose anything else, 
no man by any possibility ever can choose anything else. 
Can a man voluntarily choose that which for him, under 
the circumstances and at the time, he knows will make him 
worse off and more miserable ? I do not believe it. This 
suggests another question, which is no less than this : Is 
the universe, on the whole and in the long-run, a righteous 
universe ? Is the universe in favor of good or evil ? And 
that, friends, means nothing more nor less than this other 
question : Does the universe care anything about its own 
laws, respect its own integrity ? And that again leads us to 
this other statement, which shall complete our circle : if the 
universe is right, the keeping of its laws — the laws of our 



Morals and Knowledge. 137 

own nature — must forever lead to our welfare and our hap- 
piness. That means that laws when kept are helpful to men, 
when broken are injurious. What is the definition of right } 
It means nothing else, and can mean nothing else, than 
simply law-keeping. That man, that woman, that child, 
that society, that state that obeys the laws of its nature, 
is the one that is doing right -, for right is simply this, — obe- 
dience to the laws of things. 

We are brought, then, face to face with this fact: that 
knowing and obeying the laws of the universe is the condi- 
tion of life, of progress, of human happiness. Men desire 
life, they desire progress, they desire happiness. What 
more, then, needs to be done than that they shall come really 
to know, to feel, and to believe that it is always expedient, 
always best for them to do right ? Do you believe it ? If 
you do not, then you are infidel toward God and the uni- 
verse. You believe that you can cheat the universe into 
favoring that which is against its own eternal, inexorable 
laws. Do you believe anything as absurd as that ? If you 
do not, then you must believe that the universe is always in 
favor of righteousness ; you must believe that, on the whole 
and in the long-run, it is always for your interest to do right, 
and cannot possibly be for your interest to do wrong. If, 
then, I say, the world could only come as a whole to know 
this, — not simply have me tell it to them, and they only half 
believe it, — but if the world could come to see it to be true 
in all its length and breadth and height and depth, — why, 
then, friends, the world — except that part of it that lives in 
madhouses — would be led forward in the path of right, of 
necessity, by the power of selfishness itself, if it lacked all 
other motive. It could not possibly be otherwise. 

Let me now go on for a few moments, and give you some 
apparent exceptions to this rule, because I know your 
minds must be full of cases that appear to you not to come 
under so sweeping a generalization as this. Here, for exam- 
ple, is a man who is wholly under the influence of his pas- 
sion,— let it be lust or thirst for drink, or whatever it may 



138 The Morals of Evolution. 

be. Why, you say, this man is all the time doing what 
he knows is wrong, what is injurious to him and to others. 
Here is another man who lacks any high development of 
mind. He lives, as we say, on a low plane. He has no 
elevated tastes. He does not care for music nor poetry 
nor art, for any of the refined or higher pleasures of society. 
He does not thrill at the beauty of the heavens above 
him. There is no sense of mystery and of power in the 
world that appeals to his heart, that makes him feel that 
there is something deeper beneath the surface of things 
than he has yet fathomed. He is simply a sordid, animal, 
common kind of man, with no high tastes. Now this man is 
all the time doing things, you say, that are wrong, that are 
low, that are mean, that are commonplace, that are sordid, 
that are selfish. 

Take another class of men, — men that have no develop- 
ment of the power of imagination in them ; for there is no 
other faculty of the human mind more intimately connected 
with the question of right and wrong than this of the imag- 
ination. A man like a barbarian, who never thinks about 
to-morrow, is not able to realize how he will feel to-morrow, 
who simply seeks his present gratification, whatever it may 
bej like the savages of the Western plains, who, if they 
are able to kill a buck or a buffalo to-day, gratify their 
hunger and gorge themselves to the utmost, and to-morrow 
and for a week or two to come will starve. They have no 
imagination in regard to to-morrow, no foresight, no fore- 
thought, no self-control. Take a man or child who is cruel. 
As an illustration, concrete and patent to you all, take the 
Pomeroy boy, lacking in power of sympathy. There is a 
radical defect in his nature. I do not believe that it is 
simple cruelty. We speak of a tiger as being cruel. A 
tiger is not consciously cruel. He has no power of sympa- 
thy, so that the cry of his victim thrills his heart, so that he 
is able to imagine the pangs of pain he is inflicting. I do 
not believe it possible for any human being who is sensitively 
sympathetic, who feels what pain in another means, and who 



Morals and Knowledge. 1 39 

is capable of the thrill of sympathy — I say I do not believe 
it is possible for any such human being consciously and 
purposely to inflict pain on another. It means a radical 
defect of nature when a person is able to play the part of 
the tiger or the beast, and to tear and slay right and left, and 
feel no compunctions or pangs of pain in his own soul. 
These, friends, are apparent exceptions. We say of these 
people, the drunkard, the licentious man, the cruel man, 
these that are doing all sorts of evil things perpetually, — we 
say of them. They know better. 

Now let us face the matter a little without prejudice, and 
see how much this knowing better means. Take the case of 
)^our little boy, — perhaps you have had some experience 
like this during the Christmas holidays, — you tell him that 
he must not eat too much candy; if he does, it will make 
him sick. What is the attitude of the child toward you at 
such a time? You say, after you have told the child, he 
knows better than to do it ; and, if he does it, he ought to 
suffer, and it is good enough for him. Does the child, in any 
real, comprehensive sense, know better? He knows that 
you have told him so and so ; but he has not had any expe- 
rience of those things expressed in the results of his conduct ; 
he does not feel what it means, as he will when he has grown 
old and has passed through these things for himself. He 
simply knows that he wants the candy. He knows that for 
him, just then, with his appetite, with his imagination of the 
pleasure that he will receive from it, this candy means more, 
to him, for good, than anything else he can think of. That 
is the predominating feeling in the child's mind. He does 
not know, in the sense in which you do, that, if he does it. 
it will be injurious to him. There is this imaginative, this 
sympathetic, this moral side of intellectual perception, that 
must come in before there can be anything that deserves the 
name of real knowledge. 

And so I say of the man who is drinking, and killing himself 
with drink : the principle holds substantially in his case just 
as it does in the case of the child. I remember years ago 



140 The Morals of Evolution. 

hearing Mr. Gough give one of his most impassioned lectures 
on the subject of temperance. He was describing the state 
of mind that he used to be in. He said he could remem- 
ber when he was so under control of this thirst that, if 
he were standing on the bank of a river of fire and a 
bottle of drink came floating down, he would not hesitate a 
moment, but would plunge in to seize it. Does this action, 
extreme as it is, contradict the principle that I have just 
enunciated ? I think not. Mr. Gough being what he was, 
under those circumstances, just at that time, controlled by 
these all-consuming desires, — to him, then, that bottle of 
drink was more than all the universe beside : it was the one 
thing that to him was good and desirable. And he would 
have done just what every man does : he would have chosen 
that which to him at the time seemed best. I say, friends, 
the principle in this case, though it be deep as hell is beneath 
the height of heaven from the other illustration, — the prin- 
ciple underlying it is precisely the same as that which under- 
lies the self-destruction of the martyr. The martyr sees God 
and his truth, or he sees the love of his country or the love of 
his home, and he sees it so vividly that it consumes him, that 
it thrills him through and through, that, for the time being, 
it is the universe to him; and, let the fires crackle about him 
if they will, he chooses God, his truth, his liberty, his coun- 
try, his love, his all, at the price of everything in the universe 
beside. 

I say then, at either extreme, in the depths of hell or in 
the heights of heaven, this principle rules forever, and 
must rule. No man can escape himself, no man can fly 
away from his own nature ; and he must choose, if he be 
free, that which, at the time, seems to him most desirable. 
Society may have told him a thousand times that it is not 
good, it may have wrought ruin a thousand times to some- 
body else, but he believes that he shall escape, or, at any 
rate, believes that it is best for him just then, and he chooses 
it in spite of any possible consequences. Take it, business 
men, home to your own concerns. Have you ever, in the 



Morals and Knowledge. 141 

course or your life, been guilty of a transaction that you know 
now, as you look back at it, was wrong ? Have you money 
invested anywhere that you know does not rightfully belong 
there? Have you ever injured one of your fellow-men in 
this way ? If you have, do you not now know that it was 
not good for you ? do you not know that the universe never 
forgives ? Do you not know that you must pay that back in 
some way to the uttermost farthing ? All the world believes 
it. Even those sects and creeds that offer you unlimited 
forgiveness just for believing in and pronouncing a name 
have held to this fact, that the universe never forgives ; for 
God himself, in their scheme, has paid the price. The price 
must be paid by somebody. Is it not perfectly plain, then, 
that it was not a wise transaction on your part, that it was 
not good altogether? Do you not know, if you have be- 
come rich at the expense of anybody else, that it was a bad 
bargain ? Do you not know that, if you have ruined anybody 
else in any direction, it has taken away from your happiness 
more than it has conferred ? Do you not know that you 
would have been better off in a poorer house, with less 
social honor and distinction, if you had been true to your 
manhood ? Do you not know, then, this one thing, — that it 
always pays to do right? Do you not believe it through 
and through ? And, when you were guilty of that transaction 
that now you recognize as wrong, did you not persuade 
yourself that, however wrong it might be for others, however 
somebody else might have suffered for a similar transaction, 
that for you, just at that time, it was best ? Did you not 
persuade yourself that you would escape, that you would 
not suffer as others do, that your circumstances were 
peculiar? Had you not, in other words, committed the 
unspeakable folly of thinking you could cheat the universe ? 
That is what it means. When therefore you face this one 
grand fact, when you wake up to the knowledge that this can 
never be successfully done, is there anything that can per- 
suade you to do wrong, with your eyes open, seeing it clearly 
and fairly? 



142 The Morals of Evolution. 

The point I wish to bring out from all this length of illus- 
tration and enforcement is this : that when men learn — 
what is eternally true — that it is for their interest to do 
right, when they learn that at the other end of the pathway 
of truth and justice lies the grand consummation of human 
happiness and human peace, then the wild horses of their 
own selfishness will be harnessed to the chariot of love and 
truth, to drag them on toward the goal of man's divinest 
possibilities. It is ignorance, friends, ignorance of some 
kind and in some degree, that has wrought the evil, the 
misery, and sorrow of the world. Look over the earth 
to-day, and see if it be not true. I cannot cover the 
ground. I wish to cull an illustration here and one there, 
so that you may see the way my thought runs. Take it 
in regard to the problems of society, — of pauperism, for ex- 
ample, or of crime. The world is just beginning to learn 
that there is an intimate connection between the brain, the 
body, the physical surroundings of man, and his moral char- 
acter. Prominent savants of Germany have recently told 
us, after spending a lifetime in studying the brain, that they 
have never discovered in the case of a confirmed crimi- 
nal any other than a brain abnormal and diseased. Does 
not every intelligent philanthropist know at the present time 
that the way to lift up the morals of our cities is to look 
after the sanitary conditions, tenement houses, the surround- 
ings and associations and infected atmosphere of the places 
in which the children live and grow 1 Does not every man 
know to-day that, if he is going to solve the problem of pau- 
perism, he must not simply mean well, not simply scatter his 
money on every side, not simply support this institution or 
that, but must learn the laws by which men can safely be 
helped.'' A lady, one of the prominent philanthropists of 
the city, told me only two or three weeks ago, " I have been 
spending my life in creating paupers ; and I am done." 
What did she mean ? She meant that, under the inspira- 
tion of the noblest feelings and desires to help men, she 
had been working in the wrong direction, and doing more 



Morals a7td Knowledge. 143 

mischief than she had good her whole Hfe long. It means, 
then, that intelligence, knowledge, are at the bottom of this 
great problem ; and by knowledge, if ever, it must be solved. 
It is not enough to mean well : knowledge is the key to the 
morals of society as well as to its other problems. 

And so in the case of the states and governments of the 
world. How is it that men age-long have submitted to des- 
potisms, — millions of peasants ground down under the heel 
of one licentious and irresponsible tyrant? Because the 
people have been ignorant : they have supposed that he was 
the representative of the gods, that he ruled by divine right ; 
and they dared not, on peril of their souls, rebel. It is igno- 
rance that has made despotism possible. How is it that 
men to-day are so badly governed all over the world ? Even 
here in the most intelligent country, as we like to believe, 
in the world, we are badly governed, because the people are 
ignorant of the practical problems of statesmanship, because 
they do not know enough to solve them themselves, and they 
do not know enough to select men that are capable of solving 
them. It is ignorance that is at the bottom of all the gov- 
ernmental evils of the world to-day. Do you not believe that 
the masses of the men of America would infallibly select as 
their representatives to Congress, and as the President to 
rule over them in the coming few years, the men that would 
solve these problems rightly, if they only knew who they 
were ? What is at the bottom of the controversies of par- 
ties this way and that t Simply that neither side is able as 
yet to comprehend and solve the great questions at issue. 

In the religious world, it is the same. How was it with 
Philip II. who rejoiced over the massacre of St. Barthol- 
omew, that one of the greatest and bloodiest crimes of his- 
tory ? Because he was so ignorant of the truth of God, so 
blinded by the Catholic prejudice of his age in favor of 
the ecclesiastical conception of God, that he, like Paul, 
verily thought he was doing God service. He thought he 
was doing God service to establish the Inquisition. He 
thought he was doing God service to be the means of 



144 ^'^^^ Morals of Evolutioii. 

putting to cruel torture and horrible death hundreds and 
thousands of innocent old women and children, on the 
charge of witchcraft. If you look at these things from 
the standpoint of the age, and not from the standpoint 
of our own time, you will discover that these atrocities 
of the world were none of them conscious and purposed 
cruelty. The men that stood by the side of the racks in 
the Inquisition, and listened to the groans and the cries of 
their victims, were governed by what they thought was the 
mercy of God. They were putting these few men to tor- 
ture and to death to save, as they supposed, hundreds and 
thousands from the eternal tortures of hell. It was not 
conscious cruelty, it was ignorant mercy that built the 
Inquisition. It is the ignorant, stupid good-nature of the 
world that has been guilty of the larger part of its infamies. 
I tell you then, friends, that the one thing that the world 
needs, in society, in government, in religion and every- 
where, — the one thing it needs is light. The selfishness 
of men will lead them to God, if there be no better mo- 
tive, when they once discover the way and know that it is 
the way of peace and the path of pleasantness, as the old 
Bible declares it to be. At night, the beasts of the jungle 
prowl about in search of prey. At night, all the cruel 
creatures of the world come forth to display their hideous- 
ness and pounce upon their victims. But, when the light 
comes, they get themselves to their dens and holes, and the 
world is beautiful and fair because the sun is up. And so it 
has been in the moral world from the first. The beasts of 
cruelty, the beasts of lust, the beasts of crime, have found 
their field in the night of the world's darkness and ignorance. 
Darkness, friends, — it is evil itself. Darkness is hell and the 
way to hell ; and the inspiration, the best thought of the 
world has said from the first that " God is light, and in him is 
no darkness at all." And it is a beautiful, glorious inspira- 
tion of the writer of the book of Revelation, where he says, 
speaking of the city that shall be the permanent home of 
God: "There shall be no night there. They need no 



Morals mid Knowledge. 145 

candle, neither light of the sun : for the Lord God giveth 
them light, and they shall reign forever and ever." Humanity 
has been like a ship lost in the storm and darkness of a fog 
at sea. She has wandered far from her course, she has been 
in straits and difficulties and dangers a thousand times ; but 
both captain and crew have always desired to follow that 
path which would lead them to what they conceived to be 
the haven of rest, of happiness and of peace. But when the 
sun rises, or if only the fog lifts and lets the pilot catch sight 
of an eternal star, so that he can take his reckoning and find 
out his latitude and longitude, then all the power of the 
universe, co-operating with the earnest anxiety of officers and 
crew, shall lead the old ship on her course toward the harbor 
of righteousness and peace and joy. 



Rights and Duties in Matters of Opinion. 



I have had occasion more than once to call your attention 
to the central principle of the theme that I have been pur- 
suing in this course of sermons, that the object and end of 
life are human well-being, progress, and happiness. That on 
which, in the long-run, these depend, is conduct ; and that 
which is chiefly concerned in determining conduct is opinion. 
The one object of all thought, investigation, and study, is 
the formation of opinions. And, since opinions deter- 
mine conduct, you will easily see that they are among the 
most important things that can claim our attention. But in 
spite of this fact, which would seem to be apparent on the 
face of it, there is a widespread popular feeling here in New 
England, and I think largely over the country, which has 
crystallized itself into the words that you will recognize as 
having heard many a time, " It does not make any difference 
what you believe." Let us look, if we can, and find out how 
this strange thought has sprung up. How has it come about 
that thoughtful people are able to say, and to say sincerely 
and earnestly. It does not make any difference what you be- 
lieve ? I think after this fashion. We have been taught 
here in New England from the first, generation after gener- 
ation, — taught by the highest authority of religion, by those 
who have claimed to speak in the name of God, — that it was 
absolutely essential that we should hold such and such opin- 
ions concerning God, man, and the future, in order that we 
might live religious and moral lives. But the practical ex- 
perience of men has, after many years, taught them that these 
assertions are not true. And so, because it is not necessary 



. Rights and Duties i7t Matters of Opinion. ' 147 

that we should hold these opinions, because many that hold 
neither the one nor the other of them are among the noblest 
and best of our citizens, — best men in our churches, best 
men in society, best men in political life, — because, I say, this 
is true, men have thoughtlessly leaped to the illogical conclu- 
sion that it does not make any difference what opinions you 
do hold. 

There is here a certain measure of truth that we must 
admit, in order to disentangle the false from the true. It does 
not make any difference what you believe concerning matters 
that are purely speculative, that are not practical, that do 
not come home to the real life of the world. It does not, 
for example, make any difference whether you believe, what 
a great many astronomers think, that there is another planet 
away out beyond Neptune. Whether you believe that or 
not does not make any difference to your practical life. 
What you believe about the chemical composition of the sun 
does not make any difference to your practical life. Or, take 
it in the realm of histor}'-, what your judgment may be of 
the character of Julius Caesar, whether you think he really 
intended to subvert the peace of Rome, or whether he was 
a patriot acting according to the best light that he had in 
the conditions in which he was placed, — it does not make 
any difference what you believe. You may agree with Mr. 
Froude concerning the character of Henry the Eighth, or 
with those that hold the opposite opinion. But the very 
moment that you come to the affairs of practical life, the 
things that touch conduct, that touch character, then, to 
say that it does not make any difference what you be- 
lieve, you will see at once to be absurd. Suppose you 
are in business, speculating a little in stocks. It may make 
the difference between a wreck and a fortune what opinion 
you hold concerning "Erie" or "Wabash," or what you 
think of the stock-market in Chicago ; whether corn is going 
up or going down j what the prospect is going to be of a 
supply of hides next fall or a year from the present time. 
Take it in regard to the business of a lawyer, whether he has 



148 The Morals of Evolution. 

correct opinions as to what are the laws on the statute-books 
of Massachusetts, whether he knows the methods of proced- 
ure before the Supreme Court at Washington, makes a very 
large difference, if he is going to hold the interests of clients 
in his hands and have anything to do with the decision of 
cases. In the matter of navigation, what a man thinks about 
the art of building ships, about the mariner's compass, about 
the use of charts, about the location of rocks and shoals, — 
these things mean life and death. And so in every depart- 
ment of practical life. What you think about vital religion 
is just as important. It does not make any difference 
whether or not you believe as the school-men in the Middle 
Ages did on some matter that is purely speculative, up in 
the air ; except — and here is a vital exception — if you do 
firmly believe that a multitude of things of no importance 
is of first importance, then it makes a difference ; because 
these pseudo-opinions stand in the way of your discovering 
and acting upon the true. I say, then, it makes a great deal 
of difference what you think about God, what you think about 
human nature, what kind of a being man is, what you think 
about sin, about evil, about crime, about patriotism, about 
the social problems of the time. The minute you come into 
practical affairs, to those things that, as I have said, touch 
character and conduct, then opinion means life and death, 
and it is not a slight affair at all. 

Such, then, being the importance of opinions, let us for a 
moment pass on to consider some of the fundamental prin- 
ciples underlying the rights and duties that concern this 
matter of belief. And the first thing that you ought to be 
careful about is that you possess something that you have 
a right to dignify by the name of an opinion. This is not 
by any means as easy as at first you might be disposed to 
think. The majority of people do not have any opinions. 
They have simply notions, impressions, sentiments, feelings j 
they have prejudices, a desire to see this thing prevail, or 
that. But how many men are there in the city of Boston 
that, concerning any of the great problems of the world, 



Rights and Duties in Matters of Opiniojt. 149 

have earned the right to say that they have an opinion? 
How many men are there that have studied the question, 
that have weighed opposing claims and probabilities and 
testimony, so that their opinion is worth the breath it takes 
to utter it? There are thousands of people who are like 
looking-glasses : they have a shadow of whatever happens 
to be standing before them. They have an opinion so long 
as they are talking with some positive person who believes 
something ; but let that person go away, and the shadow in 
the looking-glass is gone, and it is blank. They are like the 
sand on the seashore : the last person that goes by makes 
a track, and the next wave that comes up washes it away, and 
it is ready for another track. Or they are like a piece of 
putty that will take and hold the shape that the last pressure 
gives it ; until some strong man comes along and gives it a 
stronger pressure. How many men, if some important ques- 
tion in religious matters comes up, have no opinion about it 
at all until their weekly papers come and they see what the 
editors are saying about it ! How many people are there in 
the political world, who, if they are Democrats, have a Demo- 
cratic opinion simply, and, if they are Republicans, have a 
Republican opinion ! They have the opinion of the leading 
party newspaper to which they belong, no opinion of their 
own ] for they have not looked into the matter, know nothing 
about it. 

I say, then, the first thing of importance here, before we 
talk about opinions at all, is that you make sure that you. 
have an opinion. But, granting you have one, let us 
then look into the pretensions of the statement that is so 
common, that passes current and unchallenged through the 
society of the world, — " I have a right to my own opinion." 
No : you have not. You have no right to hold an opinion on 
any subject whatever, until you have used the utmost thought, 
study, and care to make sure that that opinion is true. You 
have no right to an opinion because it is your opinion. If 
there were only a vagrant law in the intellectual realm, the 
great majority of opinions that are walking up and down 



150 The Morals of Evolution. 

the earth would be arrested for lack of "visible means of 
support." You have no right to hold an opinion, I say, 
simply because it is yours, because you have inherited it, 
or because you have chosen to adopt and patronize it. 
Remember what we have all seen : that, in the practical 
life of man, opinions touch character, touch the conduct 
of the world. Opinions, therefore, determine human wel- 
fare and happiness. And you have no right to trifle 
with these things, any more than a druggist has a right 
to deal out arsenic over the counter, because he is 
of the opinion that it is something else. You have no 
right to spread abroad your opinions, until you have done 
your utmost to be sure that they are true; because, as I 
have just said, these opinions determine the conduct, char- 
acter, welfare, happiness of men. These are sacred things, 
which you must not play with just to please yourself and your 
own fancies and notions. There is in one of the public 
halls of this city, up over the platform, the motto : "To speak 
his thought is every freeman's right." I suppose that, ac- 
cording to the intent of the person who first gave utterance 
to these words, they are true. That is, he meant that no 
church had any right to prohibit a man from speaking 
his thought. He meant that no State had any right to put 
a padlock upon the lips of a free man. And to that extent 
he was right j for neither Church nor State has any mo- 
nopoly of human wisdom. There is no probability that 
either Church or State has any private means of gaining 
access to divine wisdom that is not open to all. Therefore 
neither Church nor State has any right to claim to be infal- 
lible. They have no right to determine whether a man shall 
think this way or that, speak this way or that, except so far 
as his utterances may touch the practical morality of the 
world. But because neither Church nor State has a right to 
interfere, that does not give a man, by any manner of means, 
the right to utter any thought that he pleases to hold. Be- 
cause no outside power should interfere with you, does that 
take away your own conscience, your own sense of respon- 



Rights mid Duties in Matters of Opinion, 151 

sibility ? Does that take away the fact that on right opin- 
ions the welfare of the world ultimately turns, and that 
wrong opinions are and must be disastrous ? 

Must a man, then, not have any thoughts ? Must he not 
give utterance to what he believes ? If you have no right 
to hold opinions that are not true, if you have no right to 
give utterance to opinions that are not true, must you there- 
fore stop thinking and stop speaking? By no manner of 
means. The principle does not lead to that. It leads to 
this : that you have no right to assert as certainly true, or to 
believe as certainly true, anything that is not verified. But 
you may hold opinions tentatively. You have a right to say, 
I believe, with the facts and evidence I can find, that such 
and such things are so. You have a right to spread abroad 
your opinions after you have been as careful as you possibly 
can, with this proviso always accompanying them. And it is 
your duty to hold these opinions always open to reconsid- 
eration, — open for new light, for new evidence, — not to 
settle down into a petty private throne of personal infalli- 
bility : that is as much more contemptible than the in- 
fallibility of the Pope of Rome as one individual is less than 
all Christendom. Hold your opinions, then, tentatively, 
ready for revision, ready for new light. 

And there is one more point, which I think goes contrary 
to the current of popular thought; and that is concerning 
the matter of toleration. You have no right to tolerate a 
false opinion in me. I have no right to tolerate a false 
opinion in you. Not — please remember — that you have 
any power to use, any right to use, force to prevent my hold- 
ing or uttering my ideas ; not that I have any right to use 
force to prevent your holding or uttering yours; but that 
no quarter, no mercy, should anywhere be shown to false- 
hood in thought any more than in speech. Can we not 
separate between toleration of thoughts, of ideas, of systems 
of belief, and toleration of the persons holding them ? If it 
be indeed injurious to men to hold false opinions, why, then, 
can I not so separate between him, my brother and my 



152 The Morals of Evolution, 

friend, as to hate and pursue and destroy, if I can, his 
opinions for his sake, in love, in brotherhood, in good- 
will ? Many a man holds opinions which are more per- 
nicious than as though he carried a viper in his bosom. 
If I should attack the viper and destroy it, would I be an 
enemy of the man ? If, then, I fight relentlessly, pitilessly, 
persistently, life-long, a certain system of belief that I feel 
to be utterly false and wrong it does not argue at all any 
lack of pity, charity, brotherhood toward the holders of 
those opinions. Rather, if I be sincere, I am their truest 
and firmest friend. And you, if you can seek out, in all the 
long catalogue of my opinions, some one that is not true, — 
do you not confer upon me the highest favor by convincing 
me of it and helping me to put away so much more false- 
hood that would injure and pervert my life, so much that 
stands in the way of my walking along the path that leads 
toward God and truth ? 

Since, then, it is so important that we hold correct opin- 
ions, and that we utter opinions that are correct, we shall 
see how necessary it is for us to raise and answer this next 
question, What is truth ? A simple question enough ; but, if 
I should come suddenly upon any one of you in this audience 
and ask you. What is truth? how many of you have ever 
thought it through carefully enough so that you could give 
me an intelligent answer ! How do you know whether an 
opinion is true or not ? What do you mean by a true 
opinion ? Both of these questions needs asking and reply. 
First, then. What is truth? Truth is used in two senses. 
There is a truth of things, and there is a truth of thought. 
The truth of things covers all that wide range of the universe 
outside of our own brains. The truth of thought covers the 
world within. For example, it is a question concerning the 
truth of things as to whether Nero really set fire to Rome 
himself or whether the Christians did it. It is another 
question in history as to whether Joan of Arc — for it is a 
disputed point — was put to death, or whether, escaping, 
she lived a long life and died of old age. Any of these 



Rights and Duties in Matters of Opinion. 155 

questions pertains to matters of history. And then the 
whole region and range of science : the truth that certain 
gases put together in certain proportions will result in 
forming the air that we breathe ; that certain others will 
form water ; that the earth moves around the sun ; that the 
planets move in their courses under the influence of certain 
laws, — all these great matters pertaining to the outside 
world, in these are the places where we are to look for the 
truth of things. Here is reality; and no matter what we 
think about it, whether we ever think about it at all or not, 
whether we have false opinions or true, the great facts of the 
world remain unchanged. The earth revolved around the 
sun for ages before there was anybody in the world who ever 
thought of its doing so. The thinking did not touch the 
question of fact. It is true that such and such things hap- 
pened in Palestine eighteen hundred years ago. Whatever 
the opinion of Trinitarian or Unitarian, Theist or Atheist, 
may be on the subject, certain things occurred there. These 
are matters of fact. 

The other great class of truths that we need specially ta 
attend to now is that of thought ; and a thought is said ta 
be true when it corresponds with an external reality. If I 
think that the earth moves around the sun just precisely as 
it actually does, my thought is correct ; if not, it is false. 
I may hold an opinion in regard to an open polar sea. 
Nobody knows as yet, or can tell, whether the opinion is 
correct or not ; but it either is correct or it is not. My 
thought either answers to the fact, or it does not answer to 
it. So I may hold an opinion concerning the nature of God 
or of man, or of courses of conduct which I ought to follow 
under given circumstances, or as to the method of conduct- 
ing my business, or concerning a mooted point in law, or a 
question of disease, sickness, or health, — it makes no differ- 
ence what it is. If my thought corresponds to the external 
reality of the world, then it is true, my opinion is correct ; 
if it does not, my thought is false. 

Now, this being the nature of truth, this being what we 



154 The Morals of Evolution. 

must seek if we wish to have our opinions correct, the great 
practical question for us to determine is as to the tests by 
which we are to decide whether our opinions are correct or 
not. For life is nothing more nor less than a long game of 
skill and strength. As Mr. Huxley has somewhere said : 
Man is like a chess-player sitting at the board, playing with 
an unseen adversary, not knowing his skill or his power, or 
what unforeseen move he may make. We are dealing with 
this great universe. On certain opinions about matters of 
fact depends the question as to whether we are to be sick or 
well. Opinions concerning the conduct of our business 
or profession mean success or failure. Opinions concerning 
the relations in which we should stand toward our fellow- 
men determine the questions of honesty and dishonesty, of 
purity and impurity, of helpfulness or hurtfulness toward 
those that are about us. Life, then, means the playing out 
of this long game. We deal with an adversary whose power 
many times we cannot measure. But the success of the 
game depends on our learning what the nature of this adver- 
sary in any particular department of life is. If we can only 
find out the laws, so that we can know what will take place 
under given conditions, then we are prepared. Take as an 
illustration — the same principle extends in all directions — 
the art of the navigator. Just so long as he understands the 
laws of the ocean currents, of storms, of wave, of wind, so 
long as he understands the construction of a vessel in 
accordance with these laws, so that it will stand the strain 
put upon it, so that it will weather the storm, so that the 
forces of the sea will drive it on its course instead of hinder- 
ing its progress ; so long as he understands the use of the 
mariner's compass ; so long as he has a chart of the coast and 
of the whole course that he intends to pursue ; so long, in 
other words, as he knows the nature, the laws of these forces 
with which he must deal, — so long he can count, with a great 
assurance of success, upon bringing to pass the things on 
which his heart is set. It all depends upon whether his 
opinions correspond to the reality of ocean, of current, of 



Rights and Duties in Matters of Opinion. 155 

wave, of wind, of storm, of the construction and manning of 
his ship, of the use of the mariner's compass and his chart. 
If his thought corresponds to the reahty in all these direc- 
tions, then he is comparatively safe, the universe at once 
becomes his ally, the world is at his back, and he is practi- 
cally omnipotent, because the forces of the world are on his 
side. But the moment he makes a mistake, the moment he 
misunderstands one single essential element of the problem 
that is given him to work out, that moment the might of the 
universe comes upon him to crush him, because these laws 
and forces never change. He is mighty if he knows, he is 
mighty if he thinks, correctly ; but a mistake is wreck and 
ruin. It is, then, I say, of the utmost importance that we 
should be able to know by what tests we can decide whether 
our opinions in regard to the great questions of life are true 
or false. 

But there is, preliminary to this, and perhaps quite as im- 
portant, a preparation for truth-seeking, a fitness for the 
application of these tests. Let us run over this a moment, 
and see what it means. In the first place, you ought to be, — 
what the great majority of people I am afraid is not, — you 
ought to be really desirous of finding the simple truth. You 
ought to settle it in your mind that it is " the truth, the whole 
truth, and nothing but the truth " that you want. How is it 
with most people 1 Is it not true that, as we go on in life, 
we find that somehow or other we have come into posses- 
sion of certain opinions. We do not know where they came 
from : we inherited them, perhaps, or we picked them up 
along the pathway of life. But we have come to hold certain 
views of things, and have come to have a sort of personal 
attachment to them ; and, if anybody comes along and ques- 
tions their truth, nine times out of ten we resent it as a per- 
sonal affront. We are in the position, then, not of truth- 
seekers, but of positive and earnest defenders of certain views, 
without much regard to whether they are true or not. Or per- 
haps we are anxious to maintain a reputation for consistency. 
If I believed and said a thing yesterday, I will stick to it 



156 The Morals of Evolution. 

whether it is true or not. That is the attitude, I think, of the 
great majority of people. Or a person has a prejudice against 
a new truth. He does not hke it, and therefore he will not 
look at any evidence in its favor. Whether for one reason or 
another, it makes no matter what it is, people are not truth- 
seekers so much as they are anxious defenders of certain 
opinions that they happen to hold. 

Another essential prerequisite for truth-seeking is that you 
should surrender at once and forever the assumption of infal- 
libility. You must surrender the assumption that you have 
the truth, and become a humble seeker for truth. Do not try 
to read your ideas into nature. Get your ideas out of the way, 
and listen to what nature has to say to you : that is the way 
to find out what the truth is. Most people come to the 
Bible, for example, or to the doctrines of Darwin, — to any of 
those popular doctrines that rouse the interests and the pas- 
sions of men, — they come, not with the simple desire to find 
the truth : they come to attack, to defend, to fight as cham- 
pions, this way or that. But think how foolish this is. If the 
position you hold is true, why, there is not a power in the 
universe that can overthrow it. Do not be afraid to let the 
wind blow against it ! Do not be afraid to take it out of doors 
into the sunlight of the world ! If you are really dwelling in 
the impregnable citadel of eternal, everlasting truth, why, 
God is in it, and he is the foundation and the cap-stone ! And 
do you think anybody can overthrow it ? Let the men that 
are investigating pry at its foundations with their crowbars 
as long as they please, let them click with their hammers, 
let them test with their acids, — let them apply any test they 
please to its principle. Why, the whole universe is in its 
favor ! Nobody can overthrow it. Do not assume, then, 
that you have the truth. Listen, and find out what God 
desires to say. 

And there is another prerequisite to truth-seeking, — the 
condition of your brain, how you shall use it. You ought, 
when you are investigating a simple matter of fact, to make 
your brain a clear, calm, cold logic-machine, without any 



Rights and Duties in Matters of Opinion. 157 

feeling, without any care, so far as your brain is concerned, 
as to whether the thing you are investigating be true or 
false. It is your business to find out a matter of fact. 
Do not let feeling come in then. The brain of most per- 
sons, I think, is like a pair of scales that are not balanced, 
— a magical pair of scales. You may cast the universe of 
truth into one side, and you put a little whim or prejudice 
or dislike into the other, and it will go down to the abyss, 
and the universe will kick the beam. Most persons' brains 
are not machines for the discovery of truth. And yet, 
when a matter of fact is in question, the brain should 
be a clear and polished glass to reflect. A painter some- 
times flatters a face that he is copying, but a looking-glass 
never : it tells the truth because it cannot help it. You 
ought to train your brain into precisely that attitude toward 
questions of truth or falsehood. 

There is, however, one field where emotion — love, pity, 
sympathy, all the free play of the soul, — has a right to 
come in and be heard : when you are investigating a mat- 
ter of art, of poetry, the quality of a person or thing, some- 
thing that can only be understood by one in sympathy 
with it, just as only a person who has a taste for music is 
fit to judge of a symphony or an opera, — in cases like this 
you have a right to let emotion speak. But, when it is a 
matter of fact, emotion should stand utterly one side. And 
yet is it not true that, concerning some of the grandest 
matters of fact that now divide the thinking world, it 
is not evidence that decides, it is not brain, it is only 
feeling, passion, — love, hate ? Take the matter, for example, 
of the character and the real facts of the life of Jesus. 
Either Jesus was born of a virgin by miraculous concep- 
tion or he was not, — it is a matter of simple fact. He rose 
from the dead and ascended bodily into heaven or he did 
not, — it is a matter of simple fact. He wrought a miracle 
on a certain occasion, raising the dead or multiplying the 
quantity of food for those that were hungry, or he did not, — 
it is a matter of fact. And yet how many people are there 



158 The Morals of Evolution. 

that have taken sides, one way or the other, without having 
even made the sUghtest attempt to settle it as a matter of 
fact ! It is a question of feeling, — of love or hate ; it is a 
matter of desire or of prejudice. And yet feeling has no 
right in this court. It is a matter of historic verity or false- 
hood, to be decided by the evidence. 

When, then, we have made this preparation for truth-seek- 
ing, what are the tests ? This is my last question. How 
shall we know that the opinion which we entertain is true, 
how shall we find out if it is false 1 And here there are 
two classes of tests, according to the two orders of truth ; 
and it is very important that you keep them separate in 
your mind. The external truth of the world may be roughly 
divided into two classes. There is the truth of history and 
the truth of science : they are quite separable, as you will 
easily see. A question as to the historic truth concerning 
what Napoleon thought or did is a matter of testimony. 
It is a question as to the number, intelligence, capacity, 
and credibility of witnesses. You have only a balance of 
probabilities. There is no possibility — notice how sweep- 
ing this is, and yet how true — of our being able absolutely 
to settle any question of history in all its details. Points 
of so recent history as that of the last fifteen years are now 
in vigorous and red-hot dispute. It is not a question as 
to whether historians desire to tell the truth. Take it, for 
example, concerning the life of Napoleon. The people sur- 
rounding him either liked or disliked him ; and their opinions 
of what he said or did were colored by that bias, one way or 
the other. Almost anything you choose to say can have a 
double construction put upon it : almost anything you choose 
to do can be interpreted one way or another. And the 
person that looks on may try his hardest to tell the simple 
truth about it, and perhaps be unable to do it, because he 
does not know your motive, your intention, he does not know 
the state of heart that lies back of the speech or the deed. 

Historic truth then, at the best, must always remain a 
matter of a greater or less degree of probability. But when, 



Rights and Duties iii Matters of Opinion. 159 

on the other hand, we come into the realm of science, — and 
this is its grand attraction to the mind that cares for accu- 
racy, — here we come into a region where there are at least 
some things that can be finally settled. They are matters not 
of testimony. We do not, for example, to-day believe in the 
law of gravitation on the testimony of Sir Isaac Newton. 
He discovered this law. But it was not something that 
happened once, when the apple fell in his presence, and 
never happened before and never will happen again, so that 
we have only his testimony as to whether it is true or not. 
The law of gravitation is from eternity to eternity. It 
existed millions of years before Isaac Newton, and it will 
exist, so far as we know, forever. It is not something, then, 
that depends upon the accuracy of observation of any man ; 
for we can test it to-day. A competent man can go through 
the figures precisely as Sir Isaac Newton did, and verify the 
law of gravitation as he did. So in regard to the composi- 
tion of a crystal, we are not obliged to take it on the testi- 
mony of somebody who lived a hundred years ago : we can 
try the experiment, and see it crystallize right before our eyes. 
Take the question of the indestructibility of matter. It is 
not something to be taken on testimony. We can try it over 
and over and over again, year after year, and see it prove 
true always. So of the persistence of force. In any ques- 
tion of scientific truth or falsehood, we have the matter here 
before our eyes, in our presence, so that we can test and 
find it truth to-day. 

And now we reach the important thing for us as the out- 
come of our discussion : the fact that the great concerns of 
life do not rest upon any doubtful testimony. God has not 
put us into a world where life and death depend upon the 
accuracy of another man's observations, or the question as to 
whether he is minded to tell the truth. The great question 
as to what kind of a universe this is, as to what kind of a 
God manifests himself through its laws, this is not a matter 
of doubtful history, but of scientific verity. Then as to the 
nature of man, what kind of a being he is, according to what 



i6o The Morals of Evolution. 

laws he needs to live in order to develop himself, in order to 
organize into societies and states, to attain his highest pos- 
sible welfare, this is not a question of doubtful historic testi- 
mony : it is a matter of scientific observation, experiment, 
and verification. Again, as to what evil is, as to the causes 
of crime, of pauperism, of all those ills that undermine 
human happiness, that shadow the world and blot out the 
light of heaven, — these are not matters that depend on 
testimony : they are questions for observation, for experi- 
ment, to be settled by the scientific method. And so of 
all the great problems, — those of religion, those of morality ; 
the deepest questions of society and statesmanship, and the 
practical control and conduct of life, — are not those con- 
cerning which we need to be in doubt. They do not depend 
upon any Gospel or Bible or book or testimony of any wit- 
ness who is now dead : they depend upon the great facts 
and laws all around us, in whose arms we are, in whose 
presence we stand, by whose power we live and breathe, — 
they depend upon these things that are open to the obser- 
vation and experiment of the world. 

It is our business, then, in this matter of opinion to search 
simply for truth. Emotion, the love of the heart for systems 
in which we have been trained, — O friends ! I feel it as 
keenly as you, — but I have learned this one thing : 
emotion is called out by those things that we have long 
associated with, that we have learned to love, with which we 
have become familiar. No man can have this sentiment 
concerning anything or any person that is new. It needs 
time. The thought of the last century becomes the senti- 
ment and poetry of this j and the thought of this century 
will be the emotion and poetry of the next. It is our busi- 
ness — for our own sake, for" God's, for the world's sake — 
to find what is true, and let the heart come after and learn to 
love and venerate and worship the truth. It is not the 
heart's business to lead the head, but the head's business to 
lead the heart. 



MORAL SANCTIONS. 



It is commonly said that, though natural morality may be 
all very fine as a theory, it will not work in practice ; that 
nature does not discriminate, — does not mete out adequate, 
accurate, and certain punishment for the breaches of the 
moral law ; and therefore it is necessary that natural penalty 
should be supplemented by something extra-mundane, some- 
thing supernatural, by a power outside of and above nature, 
that looks over the field of human society, and, if not at the 
time that the evil is wrought, at some time shall see to it that 
every wrong done shall meet with a certain penalty, and that 
every virtuous thought and deed shall find its certain reward. 
For it is said, although all of us are well aware that evil 
brings uncomfortable results to the persons against whom 
the transgression is committed, it does not always bring its 
sure and certain result of penalty to the doer of it. And 
it is further said that, if men were sympathetic enough to 
feel the pain and suffering of others as though they were 
their own ; if they were loving enough so that they could not 
inflict an injury upon another any sooner than upon them- 
selves, it might be safe to trust to human nature ; but taking 
human nature as it is, unless men are fully persuaded that an 
evil result for every evil thought or deed will come upon 
themselves, and that this evil result will be so sure and so 
severe that it will not pay them to transgress, then there is no 
certainty that moral laws will be obeyed. All this, of course, 
will be granted ; for it is a part of our definition of an evil 
action that it is such a one as will be necessarily followed by 
an evil result. If not, it would not be evil. And, if it did not 
result in evil to the doer of it as well as to its immediate 



1 62 The Morals of Evolution. 

object, there would be no adequate motive to deter selfish- 
ness from having its own way. 

But it is commonly assumed that the evil-doer frequently 
escapes ; that nature has for him no adequate penalty. And 
out of this has sprung the demand for a theological, extra- 
worldly government of society ; for a power outside of and 
above nature, who shall look over the world and see to it 
that good is rewarded and that evil is punished. 

Without stopping at present to discuss the question whether 
this is necessary or not, I purpose, in the first place, to out- 
line a few of the main points of the scheme of theological 
penalty with which it is proposed to supplement nature, that 
we may see whether it seems just. 

Let us see if it is such a kind of government as we would 
like to have instituted in the place of natural laws and natu- 
ral results. I say theological scheme, not because this which 
I am going to outline is the only theological scheme in the 
world, or the only one that we could imagine as existing ; for 
there are many theologies, and they may be either natural or 
supernatural. But I use the word in the popular sense, as 
referring to that which to-day is dominant in Christendom. 
Now, what are some of the main features of this scheme of 
theological penalty, that debar us from accepting it ? 

In the first place, it treats innocence as though it were 
guilt. It starts with the doctrine of the fall of man ; and 
this is said to bring in its train, as the result of that one deed 
of the federal head of the race, the total depravity of human- 
ity. Natural law recognizes the fact of heredity, confesses 
the misfortune of being born of unhealthy or depraved parent- 
age, admits the fact that the children do suffer to the third 
and fourth generations ; but it does not " add insult to 
injury," and call this, which is only a misfortune, a sin, and 
it does not look upon the suffering that is thus entailed as 
being punishment. It simply recognizes the fact of misfor- 
tune and suffering. But the theology of the day teaches that 
it is not simply a misfortune to be born of sinful parents, but 
that the child comes into the world guilty before God, and 



Moral Sanctions. 165 

deserving of punishment; or, if not carried to quite that 
extreme, it does hold that the child is so born and so circum- 
stanced that it will inevitably become guilty, if not so at the 
moment of birth. The difference between the two, although 
it is made much of in theological systems, seems to me to be 
trivial or verbal, and of no practical account. Dr. William 
G. T. Shedd, one of the leading theologians of the Presby- 
terian Church, published, not a great many years ago, a 
sermon with this title, " Sin a nature, and that nature guilt.'' 
That is the old Calvinism. The child, by virtue of its being 
born of a particular race, is guilty before God, and deserving 
his eternal wrath. 

Troubled by the manifest and hideous injustice of this, 
Dr. Edward Beecher attempted to obviate the difficulty by 
supposing that men had sinned in some pre-existent state, 
and so might justly be born into this world in a state of guilt. 
But it requires only a moment's thought to see that this does 
not at all remove the difficulty : it only pushes it back into 
an imaginary former life. It does not do it away, but only 
tries to hide it. This theological penalty then is revoltingly 
unjust, in that it treats innocence as though it were guilt, and 
punishes it as though it were deserving of the wrath of the 
righteous Ruler of the universe. 

Again, theology has invented virtues which are not real virt- 
ues, and vices which are not real vices. You will remember 
that I have devoted a discourse to a discussion of this point. 
I bring it up here, however, as having a special bearing on 
our present theme. When religion becomes an institution, a 
church, an ecclesiasticism, with a life and a discipline of its 
own, with its corporate emotions and aspirations, its desire to 
conquer and control mankind, then it is a power that, first 
and foremost, desires to live and to extend its sway over the 
thoughts and the lives of men. And very naturally, therefore, 
it results that the sins which are committed against it, as 
an institution, take precedence of those that are committed 
against the natural order of things. And thus it follows that, 
in most of the ecclesiastical systems of the world, the man 



164 The Morals of Evolution. 

who doubts the pretensions of the ecclesiasticism, or dares 
to disregard one of its ceremonial laws, is looked upon as a 
greater sinner than he who has broken all the natural laws of 
morality, if, all the while, he has been true to this instituted 
religion. You can call up examples from history or your 
own observation, to show how true this is. A man who sits 
in the broad aisle of any church in this city to-day, and who 
is a strong man, one of the pillars of the church, who is nec- 
essary to its support, whose money is always ready to flow in 
carrying on those things which the church itself has at heart, 
— such a man may do almost anything, and still keep his seat 
in the broad aisle. But if he dares to be faithless to the 
institution of which he is a member, and of which he is one 
prominent support, then he has committed a sin which is not 
so readily forgiven. I say, then, theological penalty disregards 
the real, natural, vital relations of right and wrong. It pun- 
ishes sins that are no sins, and it rewards virtues that are no 
virtues ; while it lets sins that are real sins against God and 
man escape, and it lets virtues that are real virtues toward 
God and man go without recognition. 

Once more, theology declares its purpose to punish sin out 
of all proportion to its guilt. A little child, because born 
of a particular parent, is sent to eternal perdition. So ear- 
nestly have men believed this, that they have tried to invent 
ways of baptizing children before they were born, that they 
might anticipate the possibility of their dying before birth. 
The enormity of it appears in a case like that. But take it 
in the case of a man who should live sixty years, and commit- 
ted every crime of which he was capable. If, then, you can sit 
down and estimate the amount of evil that he, has done, and 
then if you can estimate eternity, you will be able to see that 
the punishment which theology threatens is out of all pro- 
portion to the guilt he has been able to accumulate. It seems, 
then to the natural thought and the natural justice of man,, 
revolting tyranny; and it naturally results in recklessness 
concerning the power and the authority of the being who gov- 
erns after this fashion. So, men say, It may be true ; but, if 



Moral Sanctions. 165 

it is true, it is unfair, it is unjust, and we will have none of it. 
So that a calm, philosophical thinker, like John Stuart Mill^ 
will declare that, if there be such a god in the universe, he will 
go to hell rather than worship him. I say it results in that 
state of revolt in the human heart against a palpable injus- 
tice. And this feature of it is recognized by theologians 
themselves, who will confess, as did Dr. Albert Barnes, that 
they can see no reason in the nature of things why it need be 
so. And it reverses the ordinary argument concerning sin 
and penalty. Instead of men being able to look each other 
in the face, and say. See, this of which you are guilty is so 
enormous that you deserve eternal punishment, the argu- 
ment has to be turned about ; and, as I have heard it time 
and time again, the ministers are obliged to say. This which 
you are guilty of is to be punished eternally, and therefore it 
must be enormous. But, if the world were turned into one 
wild carnival of crime for ten millions of years, it would not 
then even begin to approach the unfathomable enormity of 
evil that theology teaches us that God will permit and perpet- 
uate in hell. Edwards, Spurgeon, Moody, and a host of 
others, have given us graphic pictures of what Our Father will 
do and allow in perdition, beside which the blackest deeds of 
earth pale into almost the whiteness of innocence itself. The 
theological penalty, then, is out of all proportion to the crime 
committed. 

And then it has another defect. It has invented a purely 
technical method of deliverance. The terms of deliver- 
ance from the natural results of sin, in the popular theolog- 
ical scheme of to-day, stand in no sort of real, vital relation 
to the deeds committed or their natural results. Suppose 
one has committed a murder, been guilty of theft or of adul- 
tery, or of any one of the great crimes of the world. The 
terms of deliverance are what .? Reparation .? No. Believe,, 
be baptized, submit to the priesthood, become a member of 
the church, trust in the blood : do this, that, or another thing, 
any one of which, as you will see, stands in no sort of natural 
relation to the deed committed or to the deliverance expected. 



1 66 The Morals of Evolution. 

These theological nostrums are on a level with the magical 
cures for disease in the Middle Ages, or the mummeries of 
an Indian medicine-man. 

These four points, then, it seems to me are enough to show 
that this theological morality is unjust, and that it stands in 
no sort of vital relation to human life. 

Let us, then, turn away from this and consider natural 
penalty as it is revealed to us in the evolution of the world. 
The central principle of the doctrine of evolution is "the 
struggle for life and the survival of the fittest " j that is, a 
struggle on the part of all things and creatures on earth to 
fit themselves to the conditions of their existence, the sur- 
vival of those that succeed, and the dying out of those that 
fail. You will see, then, as the natural result of this, that the 
one, universal, eternal penalty of natural mortality is death, or 
some one of the steps that lead toward death. 

To clear the way for what is to follow, let us begin by ask- 
ing and answering the question as to what we mean by nat- 
ural law. It is unfortunate, I think, that we have not some 
other term to take the place of this ; because, when the word 
" law " is used, we naturally and almost inevitably think at 
once of a body of legislators or of a king making a law. We 
think of statute law, of law as the arbitrary will of some power 
which tells us, "You must do this, and you must not do that," 
and which threatens arbitrary penalty for obedience or dis- 
obedience. This is the ordinary meaning of the word "law." 
We have no other word to express what we mean by natural 
law, and yet we actually mean something very different. Let 
me, in the first place, put it into abstract language, and then 
illustrate what I mean by it. Natural law, then, is simply a 
phrase that we use to express the relations in which persons., 
things., forces stand to each other., or the mutual influences which 
they exert upon each other., by virtue of what they are. It means 
the constant universal relations between persons, things, and 
forces. Take, for example, ourselves as members of society. 
Certain men, women, and children are what they are ; and 
they are together, in certain relations, in society. What we 



Moral Smtctions. if/ 

mean by the natural law of society, then, are the duties and 
responsibilities that spring out of these natural and neces- 
sary relations. Take it into the region of things, to make 
it clearer. Suppose I have here, in some jar or vessel, the 
chemical ingredients which, brought together in certain pro- 
portions, will result in forming a crystal. What I mean by 
the natural law of crystallization is that, if I bring these 
chemical ingredients together after this fashion, a crystal will 
always be the result. They stand in such a relation to each 
other that, being what they are, they must crystallize. They 
cannot help doing so. Take as another illustration, in 
another department, — that of pure force, — the law of grav- 
itation. This law has been put into a mathematical formula, 
which I need not trouble you with ; but you know that what it 
means is this : That, given certain bodies in space, of certain 
bulk and density, they will always attract each other with 
a certain power and in a certain way. They stand in such a 
relation to each other that they exert this power. They can- 
not help doing so. And the power which they so exhibit 
necessarily depends upon the bulk and density of the bodies 
so related. So you may take it anywhere else. We say of 
v/ater, that it is a natural law that it shall freeze at a given 
temperature, and at another temperature that it shall be dis- 
sipated into steam. We say it is a law of electricity that it 
will behave so and so under certain conditions. These are 
not enacted laws. We do not think of electricity as some- 
thing that might act in some other way, only that some power 
compels it to act in this way. It cannot help acting so and 
so, as long as it is electricity. So of water. If they cease 
to act so and so, they cease to be what they are. It is the 
law of their life, then, that, under given conditions, they 
should always behave after certain uniform and fixed 
methods. 

Now we are ready to pass to our next point : that natural 
penalty, the result of a breach of natural law, is universal, 
is absolute, is self-executing. There is no such thing in the 
universe as escaping the penalty of a natural law ; no such 



1 68 The Morals of Evolution. 

thing as suspending it, or as changing its action. It is abso- 
lute, eternal, universal. It rules everything that man has 
ever seen or can see. Let us take two or three concrete 
illustrations, that you may see just what I mean. If you are 
going to have a river, it would be proper for us to say that it 
is the natural law of a river that it shall consist of banks on 
either side, and a current of water flowing between them. 
These are the conditions by which a river exists. You break 
these, and the river dies, — there is no river left. Break down 
the bank, so that the water spreads over the country, and 
you may have a lake ; but it is not a river any more. Dry up 
the water : the banks may remain, but there is a river no 
longer. So it is a natural law that you cannot have two 
mountains without a valley between them. Fill up the valley, 
and the two mountains cease to exist. It is a natural law, as 
I said a moment ago, that water will congeal and become ice 
at a certain temperature. You change that temperature, and 
the ice ceases to be : there is no ice any more. It is the 
natural law in regard to steam, that, when water becomes 
heated to a certain point, the molecular particles of which it 
is composed seek to get just as far away from each other as 
they can, — expand, as we say. And on this one law hang 
the industries of the modern world. And, if this law of 
steam could be suddenly suspended or changed, it would 
paralyze civilization. Bring it into the realm of the physical 
life of man. It is a law of my body that, if I am to live, I 
must keep my body at a certain temperature. It must have 
food; it must be preserved from hurtful influences of all 
kinds. The laws of life, in other words, must be obeyed. If 
I break these laws and become diseased, that is the first step 
toward death. If I carry the breach of these laws beyond a 
certain point, death itself ensues, and must ensue. Take it 
in regard to intelligence ; for it holds true in these higher 
realms of life, just as well as in the lower. If a man is to 
grow up an intelligent, instructed, educated being, there must 
be a certain amount of development of his brain : if that 
fails, he is an idiot. If, after he has become an intelligent 



Moral Sanctions. 169 

being, these laws of the brain are broken, he is insane. There 
are laws of thought, of study, of the pursuit of intelligence 
in this department of the world or that ; and, if a man fails 
to keep these, his brain as a physical organ may be perfect, 
but he will be ignorant. There are vast realms of truth and 
beauty, the threshold of which his foot will never cross. 
Bring it up into the realm of the moral nature. Precisely the 
same thing holds true. There are moral laws that a man, if 
he is to be a moral being, must keep. If he ceases to keep 
these, he ceases to be a moral being ; his moral nature is 
dead; he is an immoral man. The penalty, you see, then, for 
the breach of the natural moral law, the natural physical 
law, — the natural law of any kind, the wide world over, and 
through all time, — is, and must of necessity be, death. 

We are ready, then, to notice the next point which is some- 
times brought as a great objection against natural penalty; 
and that is that natural law never forgives. It never for- 
gives, in the sense of letting one off from suffering the 
natural and necessary penalty of breaking it. And here let 
us notice a curious contradiction on the part of theologians, 
as they deal with this matter of natural penalty. I have 
heard it urged a great many times against natural penalty, 
that it is not adequate ; that it does not punish inexorably 
and certainly, and therefore must be supplemented by some- 
thing else, as I said at the outset. On the other hand, when 
the purpose was not to prove that we needed somebody to 
punish, but that we needed somebody to forgive, then they 
tell us that natural law always punishes, and punishes so 
inexorably that we must have some one to deliver us out oi 
its iron grasp. This natural penalty becomes one thing or 
the other, according to the necessities of the doctrine that 
the theologians wish to prove. But nature never forgives, 
and, in the nature of things, cannot forgive. But, on the 
other hand, it can and does do that which is better than for- 
giveness. Nature has a vast and wondrous power of recu- 
peration. If I take an axe, and, going into my garden, strike 
it into the trunk of a beautiful tree, nature does not forgive 



I/O The Morals of Evolution. 

that stroke. The natural result of it, the evil, exists, and 
must exist. If I have broken the laws of its life, and if the 
hurt is serious enough, the tree will die. But, if its vitality is 
equal to the strain that is put upon it, then the power of 
recuperation comes in, and it will outlive the stroke ; it will 
overgrow the wound, and years afterward the bark shall be so 
smooth that you shall hardly know that such an accident ever 
befell it in its younger life. So, if I break any law of my 
body, if I carry the law-breaking far enough I shall die ; but, 
if not, there is this power of recuperation that shall enable 
me to overcome the devitalizing power which is dragging me 
down toward death. Nature, then, does not forgive, either 
in the physical world, the mental world, or the moral world ; 
but it does possess in itself this power pf recovery, so that 
we may outgrow the lower and the worser conditions of our 
nature, — leave them behind, — and, by and by, stand on 
heights of physical, mental, and moral beauty and glory, such 
as perhaps we do not dream of now. 

I wish now to pass to another point, where there is a large 
amount of misconception ; and I have passed over very rap- 
idly some of these that really call for more adequate discus- 
sion, in order that I may come to this. There is apparent 
over the world a large amount of what is commonly and at 
first sight called injustice. I see, for example, a man prosper- 
ous in business. Every scheme that he lays his hand to suc- 
ceeds. He becomes a king in the money market of his city; 
he is able to control, perhaps, the financial interests of a 
State. And yet this man is not a moral man, not a trusted 
man in his business except in so far as the necessities of that 
business require. He is a man impure in his life, corrupt all 
through, such a one as we have first and last seen many times 
in the history of the world, who becomes utterly shameless, 
and flaunts his disgrace in the face of the society of his time. 
We look at a spectacle like this, and we say. Surely there is 
no moral government in the world ; there is no natural pen- 
alty that treads on the heels of a man's misdeeds, else how 
could it be possible that a man like this should prosper, when 



Moral Sanctions. 171 

there may be a hundred of his underlings, men working 
patiently hour by hour at his desks, who in moral stature 
out-tower him a thousand-fold, who are true and noble men, — 
true to their wives, true to their children, true to all the rela- 
tions which they sustain in society, men of unquestioned 
integrity ? Men say, What sort of moral government is this, 
under which such a man prospers, while thousands of good 
men fail ? And yet, friends, all this confusion grows out of 
the fact that we do not discriminate in our thinking. There 
is no failure of the moral law in a career like that. There is 
not one single wrong that is not followed by its natural, nec- 
essary, and adequate penalty. What is it that we see? Let 
us analyze it just a little. Why, here is a man who fulfils 
the conditions of success in business. The result is, he is a 
successful business man. That is certainly in accordance 
with all natural law and order, as it should be. He fails to 
fulfil the conditions of a true and noble life, and therefore he 
is a corrupt, mean, contemptible man in his character. Is 
there any breach of law there ? He succeeds in that depart- 
ment of life wherein he fulfils the conditions, the necessary 
laws of success j he fails in the other department, where he 
does not fulfil those conditions. We have not yet gotten 
over the old idea of the Jews : that, if a man behaves himself, 
he has a right to claim of God, or the world, or society, pay- 
ment in cash for so doing. The promise of the Jewish 
religion was prosperity, wealth, a great many children, and 
long life for being good. But, when we come down to the 
New Testament, we find a sharper discrimination of the nec- 
essary laws of the universe than this. Jesus told people — 
though it has been forgotten ever since that time, for the 
most part — that those certain persons on whom the tower of 
Siloam fell were not specially guilty because they suffered ; 
that those whose blood was mingled with the sacrifice in .the 
temple, by the cruelty of Pilate, were not worse than those 
who escaped. And Paul tells us, in one of his letters to 
the Corinthians, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he 
also reap." He does not say that, if you sow wheat, you will 



1^2 The Morals of Evolution. 

reap oats ; or that, if you sow care in your business, you will 
necessarily reap intelligence as an historian. He does not 
tell you that, if you study the human body, you will become an 
adept in legal wisdom ; or that, if you are kind to your wife, 
you will, of necessity, get rich. He does not say that, if you 
plant your seed and take perfect care of it, if you look 
after the soil and chemicals and all the conditions of its 
growth, therefore you shall succeed in sending a rotten ship 
around the Cape of Good Hope, and have it reach its port in 
safety. We need to discriminate better, and to remember 
that each department of life has its own natural laws ; and 
that compliance with the laws of one department does not at 
all insure success in another, where the laws are not complied 
with. Now, for example, if you choose to live in a house 
that is unventilated, or where the drainage is not looked 
after, or where the water is impure, you may be the most 
pious man in the world, but that will not stand in the way 
one particle of your getting the typhoid fever. You have 
kept the laws of spiritual piety, but you have broken the laws 
of health. You receive your reward in the region where you 
keep the laws, not in the region where you break them. So 
what of it, friends ? Suppose a vicious man does ride in a 
carriage, and live in a fine house ? Suppose he is honored 
by his fellow-men as possessing great wisdom, or as being fit 
to represent them in the State Legislature or in Congress, — 
what of it ? Is there any law broken ? Is immorality unpun- 
ished 1 Is the order of nature interrupted or interfered with ? 
Friends, if you believe it best to be righteous, true, honest, 
then be so, and take the pay that comes as the natural and 
necessary result. But do not grumble or find fault with this 
universe because righteousness is not paid in greenbacks or 
government bonds. There is a law in each one of these 
departments : keeping that is success, breaking it is failure. 

Suppose, for example, that an immoral man escapes punish- 
ment from the laws of the city or the State in which he lives : 
does he therefore escape the natural, necessary penalty of the 
deeds he has committed ? This statute law — and I speak of 



Moral Sanctions. ^ 173 

it, because there is such a misunderstanding concerning it — 
was never intended as an adequate punishment for moral 
offences. It is only very recently that moral offences have 
been taken any cognizance of by statute law. When the 
first laws of nations were made, in the early history of the 
world, they paid attention simply and only to what are called 
crimes against the State. They did not attempt to regulate 
the moral relations of individuals. The law is utterly inade- 
quate to any such regulation. Who is there, what bench of 
judges, what twelve men as jurors, what court that is wise 
enough to judge of your guilt or mine, and mete out adequate 
penalty ? The only object of statute law, and the only use 
or right it has to exist, is for the defence of the State, of the 
civil and social organization as such. And so, if a man does 
escape the penalty of the State law, he does not therefore 
escape punishment. 

Let us now pass on to consider the question as to whether 
moral penalty is real, whether I can make you see its reality, 
bring it so home to your thought and feeling that you shall 
see that every breach of the moral law always has been pun- 
ished, is always punished now, always will be, always must be 
punished. At any rate, it is simple fact that nobody ever did 
escape, nobody to-day is escaping, nobody in the future ever 
can escape, the slightest infraction of any vital law. This, I 
say, is a part of the nature of things. Let me see if I can 
make it real to you. I have said that the one penalty of nat- 
ural law is death, — death, or the steps that lead toward it. 
That is, death in its totality or partial death, according to the 
amount of the infraction of the law. I have three points to 
make, three grades to notice in this progress of law-breaking 
that leads to death. If an organism is healthy, the. first result 
of the breaking of law anywhere is pain. And pain, therefore, 
while it is the penalty and punishment of broken law, is never 
— in nature — unjust or cruel or unkind. It is the warning of 
a friend. It is a sign-board marked " Danger," set up along 
the pathway of life. If you are feeling pain or suffering in 
any department of your life, you are to remember that it is 



174 T^^^ Morals of Evolution. 

simply the voice of nature, saying to you, " Stop." You are 
going in the direction of danger and evil. The first result, 
then, is pain. If I carry the breach of physical law far 
enough, — notice how true this is that I have just been saying, 
' — I cease to suffer. Every educated physician knows that, 
when he is called to the bedside of a patient, and he finds 
that, though very sick, he is not suffering any pain, this 
indicates a more dangerous condition than as though he 
were in the acutest agony. That is, if the life of the system 
is so drained that the nerves no longer thrill, — so that, 
although there are disease and disorganization, the system 
has not life enough to suffer, — :why, then the case is desper- 
ate. If he should find the patient not suffering one day, and 
then on the next should find that pain had set in, he would 
take courage ; for it would show a higher degree of vitality 
in the system than it possessed the day before. The next 
step, then, after pain, is this one I have just indicated, — such 
a degradation, a lowering of the life, that there is no longer 
vitality enough to suffer. The next step is death. 

Now let us look at this as it bears on moral penalty, and 
see if there is any real parallelism. The first result, in every 
healthy nature, of a wrong deed, is pain. A man is conscience- 
stricken, as we say. He feels ashamed of himself for that 
which he has committed. And, if his fellow-men know it, 
the additional pain that comes to him then is not simply that 
he is found out, but it is that these same moral natures, 
which are like his own, look into his soul, and reflect the self- 
contempt which he feels for his own evil deeds. And there 
is no suffering in this world — if you have ever felt it, or if 
you have ever studied the nature of man so as to know what 
it means — equal to that of a living but wounded con- 
science, the righteous sense of nobility in a man, that climbs 
up into some height of his being, and from that standpoint 
looks down with contempt upon itself, — is there anything 
worse than that ? And men have found it so unbearable that 
they could not continue to live. Men who have committed 
a crime, and who have not been discovered, have found this 



Moral Sanctions. 175 

stricken conscience so much heavier a load of suffering than 
they could bear, that they have come and submitted them- 
selves to the law, that they might try, at least, to make expia- 
tion. They have given themselves up, and said. Let me 
suffer at the hands of my fellows for the deed I have commit- 
ted j let me hide myself somewhere from the face of the earth I 
And now, to advance the next step, we find a class of men 
that most people are apt to say are not punished at all, for 
the reason that they do not feel it. May they not correspond 
to this insensibility of the body of which I have just spoken ? 
A man at last gets his conscience seared, so that he does 
not feel any remorse. He will commit the most outrageous 
deeds, and not be sorry for them in the least. He will break 
all the laws of society. He loses all care for public opinion, 
and may even come to rejoice in the notoriety of his own 
disgrace. What shall we say of a case like this ? Men de- 
clare. Here, at least, is a person unpunished. He is doing 
wrong, he is bringing any quantity of suffering and ruin upon 
other people ; and he does not care. He suffers no penalty 
at all ! Does he not ? Next to death itself, it is my deliber- 
ate opinion that just that man who is rejoicing in his villany 
and disgrace, and who is flaunting them in the face of the 
world, is suffering a punishment severer than all. Just look 
at him for a moment, and see how it only needs a little deeper 
thought to correct your misapprehension in regard to the 
government of this world. Let us start with an illustration. 
You remember that old story of the Odyssey, how when 
Ulysses is on his way home he stops at a certain island, and 
his crew falls into the hands of the sorceress, Circe. All his 
companions, who had left the ship and gone up the island to 
visit her palace, she turns into swine. When Ulysses comes 
to look after them, because they had not returned, he finds 
them brutes, rooting in the mire, grunting and sleeping in 
swinish content. They had forgotten that they ever were 
men. Think you that Ulysses, as he looked upon them in 
that condition, would say, These men are well off : they are 
in no pain. No calamity has befallen them, so long as they 



1/6 The Morals of Evolution. 

do not know it. Is it just as well to be swine as men, if only 
you do not know that you are a brute ? Is it nothing to be de- 
prived of manhood, — to lose the delicious unrest of thought, 
to miss the pleasures of friendship and the sight of the stars ? 
Is the man who is degraded, shut out from all the higher, 
nobler, sweeter realms of life, who does not know what they 
mean, — is he free from the penalty of broken law, because he 
does not know what he has lost ? Is the youth who has 
grown to the age of fourteen, and either by disease or 
on account of some congenital malformation has suddenly 
ceased to grow, and so stands still and comes to be only an 
idiot, is he as well off as another, because he does not know 
he is an idiot ? Is there nothing pitiable about a man who 
is insane, though he may think himself a king, simply be- 
cause he does not know that he is insane ? Take that beau- 
tiful little picture from Moore's " Lalla Rookh " : — 

" One morn a peri at the gate 
Of heaven stood disconsolate." 

She is sad, heart-broken, because she is not permitted to 
enter the abode of the blest. Now and then she catches a 
gleam of its brightness and glory ; now and then she hears 
a snatch of its ravishing song: she knows the beauty and the 
glory, but is not yet permitted to enter. Would you not 
rather be in her place, shut out from heaven as yet, but able 
to think of heaven, than to lie contented by the side of the 
gate, unable to hear its music or see the gleam of its glory ; 
and incompetent, even if transported into the presence and 
set before the throne of God itself, of feeling that you were 
in heaven, or knowing what it meant ? A man who is blind 
suffers no less deprivation because he does not know what 
he is losing. A man who is deaf loses no less because he 
does not know what it means to hear. So a man who is de- 
graded in his moral nature, so that he rejoices in his shame, 
who does not know what it means to be a man, who does not 
know anything of the sweets, the unspeakable delights of 
those who inhabit the higher ranges of human life, though he 



Moral Sanctions. i jj 

come to love only the sensual, and be indifferent to shame, — 
such a man is bearing a load of penalty unspeakably worse 
than any evil he can possibly inflict upon his victims, unless 
he can induce them to become willing partners in his degra- 
dation. If he only knew that there was something better, 
and longed after its attainment, there would be some hope 
for him j but, so long as he does not he is excluded from all 
possibility of advance. That men do not really think the 
evil-doer unpunished appears in the fact that no good and 
rational man would ever consent to change places with him. 
He who does not look upon this degradation toward brute- 
hood as adequate and awful moral penalty simply reveals 
the fact that the higher life, from which he is thus shut out, is 
as yet no tangible reality to his thought. Ask Beethoven 
what it would mean to be shut out of the world of music. 
This moral law then, this moral penalty, is it not universal, 
is it not exact ? May we not say of it as the Psalmist says of 
God : " If I climb up into heaven, thou art there. If I make 
my bed in the abyss, behold, thou art there. If I take the 
wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the 
sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand 
shall hold me. If I say. Surely the darkness shall cover me, 
even the night shall be light about me. The darkness and 
the light are both alike to thee." Let me close by reading 
to you some lines from Coleridge, who has shown so deep 
and true an insight into this natural law : — 

" How seldom, friend, a good, great man inherits 
Honor and wealth, with all his worth and pains ; 
It seems a story from the land of spirits 
When any man obtains that which he merits, 
Or any merits that which he obtains. 

" For shame, my friend ! renounce this idle strain ; 
What wouldst thou have a good, great man obtain? 
Wealth, title, dignity, a golden chain, 
Or heap of corses which his sword hath slain ? 
Goodness and greatness are not means, but ends ! 



178 The Morals of Evolution. 

Hath he not always treasures, always friends, 

The good, great man ? Three treasures, — love and light, 

And calm thoughts, equable as infant's breath ; 

And three fast friends, more sure than day or night, — 

Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death." 



Note. — The principle of this discourse applies to institutions, nations, and civiliza- 
tions, as well as to individuals. And all history proves it. 



Morality and Religion in the Future, 



It is said that some years ago a man wrote a book describ- 
ing the natural features, the products, and the inhabitants of 
Iceland ; and that, in devoting one chapter to the subject of 
snakes, he began it by the remarkable statement, " There are 
no snakes in Iceland." There are a great many books being 
written, sermons being preached, and review articles being 
published at the present time on the subject of morals and 
religion in the future ; and the main burden of a large part 
of them is that there are to be neither morals nor religion in 
the future. It seems to me, then, quite worth our while to 
look this matter squarely in the face for a little, before we 
proceed to our discussion. 

Are there to be any morals or any religion in the future ? 
Mr. Mallock, and the large school of thinkers and writers 
that he particularly represents, are telling us all the time that 
if science and the methods of science are to progress, — as 
they seem likely to, — and become dominant in the minds of 
men, that morality is to be undermined and overthrown. 
For he akes this remarkable position — and has argued it 
in article after article, and in one or two of his books — 
that there is no reason in the nature of things why people 
should behave themselves ; that the only reason why they 
should pursue one course of conduct and refrain from 
another is that the almighty power that controls this uni- 
verse has asserted through an infallible Church that by 
and by, in some future condition, he will punish them, if 
they do not. He goes to the length of saying explicitly that 
this is the only reason on which morals can rest ; that there 
is no difference between honesty and dishonesty, between 



i8o The Morals of Evolution. 

loyalty and treachery, between purity and impurity, — no 
difference that men will naturally find out and discover it to 
be for their interest to regard, unless they can be certain that 
the one class of actions will be punished in the future life, 
and the other will be rewarded. And Mr. Goldwin Smith, 
whose sympathies, remarkable as it seems, are all with the 
liberal school of modern thought, and who believes that the 
instituted and systematic theologies of the world are under- 
mined, and are bound to be overthrown, goes so far as to 
write gravely about the possibility of "a moral interreg- 
num." That is, he seems to think that moral character and 
action have been so intimately blended and bound up with 
the religious institutions of the world that, if once they are 
discredited, morality is gone, until a new religion can spring 
up and present men with proper and adequate reasons for 
their behavior. 

Let us look at this, and see what are the facts. If men — 
every one of them or any large number of them — have been 
behaving after a certain fashion called moral, and refrain- 
ing from immoralities simply because of certain ideas that 
they have held about God, of course it will follow that, if 
they lose these ideas, they will be likely, if they think it for 
their interest, to try the experiment of immoral conduct. In 
so far as a person's conceptions of morality, ideas of moral 
behavior, have been blended with or modified by their relig- 
ious ideas, of course they will be changed by the pass- 
ing away of those religious conceptions. But, in every case, 
the experience of the world will demonstrate to them, first or 
last, that morality is something that does not depend either 
upon theology or religion, but inheres in the very nature of 
things. Let a man attempt to pursue a line of immoral 
conduct, thinking that he will find all smooth sailing, and 
that fair winds will blow his pleasure-yacht over sunny 
summer seas, — so soon as he attempts to go contrary to 
one of the eternal forces and laws, he will wreck himself 
as surely as the ship that runs upon a hidden rock. For 
what do we mean by morality, — by a good action or a bad 



Morality and Religion in the Future. 1 8 1 

action ? I have already told you abundantly and at length. 
I only wish to recall it here, to clinch this part of my argu- 
ment. A bad action is an action which results in evil to 
mankind, that takes away from the well-being, from the 
happiness, from the life of somebody. A good action is one 
that helps mankind, that adds to the life and well-being and 
happiness. And these laws are the very conditions of our 
being. There is no more possibility of an interregnum of 
them than there is of an interregnum of the laws of chemical 
attraction or the laws of electricity or the laws of planetary 
motion. These laws of our life are the very conditions 
of life j and to break them means now and forever pain, 
disease, suffering, degradation, death. It makes no differ- 
ence, then, what kind of God men believe in, or whether they 
believe in any at all, so far as the integrity and the eternity 
of these moral conditions of our human life are concerned. 
There is to be, then, a morality in the future. So long as 
the world stands, and so long as there live in the world 
creatures which are capable of feeling, of thinking, of willing, 
just so long morality will be a part of the very nature of 
things. It cannot be abolished except by bringing the world 
to an end. 

But how about there being any religion in the future? 
The friends and the enemies of science, both, — or some 
part of them, — are telling us that religion and theology 
are only superstitions belonging to the childhood and 
twilight period of human development, and that they will 
be outgrown and left behind one day, when the world 
grows to its perfect humanity. Let us see what they mean. 
If you only question closely either one who is afraid of 
science, and so thinks it is going to destroy religion, or one 
who believes in science, and hopes it is going to destroy re- 
ligion, — if, I say, you question either of these, you will find 
that what they mean by religion and theology is some partic- 
ular religion, some particular kind of theology. And all this 
may be true. The intelligence and advancement of human 
thought and life have already destroyed ever so many theol- 



1 82 The Morals of Evolution. 

ogies and ever so many religions, and left them outworn, 
empty shells, useful only as indicating certain stages of 
human progress in the past. But does this mean that 
theology and religion themselves can ever be outgrown and 
left behind? Let us clear our thought on this subject by 
simply asking ourselves the question what we mean by the- 
ology and what we mean by religion. Theology is nothing 
more nor less than the theorizing of men concerning the 
universe. Whatever name you give this universe, — whether 
you call it God or nature, it makes no matter,. — it exists. 
Out of it we have come, on it we depend for life and breath 
and everything we possess, every moment of our lives. In 
its laws is life, in disregard of them is death. It makes no 
difference whether you think of this universe as possessing a 
separate soul that you call God, or whether you think of it as 
it exists in its totality, without any such distinction : in either 
case, it exists ; and every man who thinks must have some 
theory about it, and this theory that you have of the universe 
is your theology. So no class of men in the future, save idiots 
and the insane, can possibly escape having a theology. What 
do we mean by religion ? Theology is the intellectual, theo- 
retical view that we take of the universe : religion, on the 
other hand, expresses the imaginative, sympathetic, emotional 
relation, in which we stand to this same universe. It is the 
feeling that we have about this great being, of whose life we 
are a part, in whose presence we must forever abide, — the 
feeling we have about the universe or the power or powers 
that we suppose to control and govern it, and guide its desti- 
nies. So no matter what your thought may be about it, so 
long as man is capable of thinking and of feeling, so long he 
must have religion. As well might a bird escape the confines 
of the atmosphere by means of which it flies, as well might 
a fish outswim the limits of the sea, as well might a mariner 
outsail the horizon, as for thinking, intelligent, sympathetic 
human beings to escape from theology or religion. They 
will then remain. There will be then, in the future, mo- 
rality, theology, and religion. 



Morality and Religioii in the Future . 183 

One thing seems very strange and curious to me. I can 
hardly understand the state of mind into which a man can 
get, who at the same time believes in God and is afraid of 
the progress of knowledge. Only think for a moment what 
it means. These brains of ours, if there be a God, are the 
work of that God ; and this whether the theory of creation 
or evolution be true, it makes no matter which. And by 
means of these brains, and by them only, can we attain to any 
knowledge of the world, of humanity, past, present, or future. 
For, though people talk a great deal about sympathetic 
knowledge and heart knowledge as separate from that of the 
intellect, all that they mean by it or can mean is the sympa- 
thetic side of intellectualism ; for man without any brain, 
though he might have ever so much heart, — be all heart, — 
could never know anything, or have even one single thought. 
All our knowledge of the universe, then, comes through the 
brain. God, on the supposition of those who believe in him, 
is the author of that brain. He is also the author of the 
universe that we are trying to become acquainted with. And 
yet there are thousands of persons who firmly believe these 
things, who seem to think that, if by some fatal mischance 
or effort we find God out, morality and religion are to go 
by the board. What kind of a conception can they have of 
God? That he is a sham that it is not safe to probe too 
deeply ? That he is playing a game of deception with us, and 
that, if we find out what he is really doing, we must lose our 
confidence in and our respect for him .? Can it be that men 
can have lurking in the depths of their nature a thought of 
a being like this as a God, and still have the face to go 
through the farce of offering him worship ! And if he be 
genuine, and if he has made a genuine universe, then is 
it not true that, the more we know about him and about 
his work, the more we shall wonder, admire, and love ? I, 
for one, if God really has been cheating us all these thou- 
sands of years,— though it would be ever so painful,— would 
like to find it out. It seems to me, then, that, if we really 
have trust in God, we must believe that morality and relig- 



1 84 The Morals of Evolution. 

ion, and all good and true and beautiful things, will only be 
increased by the advancement of human thought and the 
broadening of human discovery. 

Having, then, settled, as I trust, to our satisfaction, that 
both morality and religion are permanent elements of 
human nature and human life, let us go on now, and ask 
ourselves the question as to what form, in the future, mo- 
rality and religion are likely to assume, and what their prob- 
able relations to each other will be. Have we any way of 
forecasting the future thus .'* It seems to me we have, so far 
as the general trend and development of human life are con- 
cerned. If I stand on the banks of a great river, it makes 
no difference whether I know just the particular direction in 
which it flows below me or not : if I do know where it has 
come from and the general outline of its course so far, I can, 
with a certain degree of probability, determine its future flow. 
And so, judging by the past progress of man and the laws 
of human thought, it seems to me that we can forecast, 
within certain degrees and limits of probability, the shape 
that morality and religion must assume in the future, and 
what their ideal relations to each other must be. 

First for morality then. It needs no farther argument, — 
for it springs out of and depends upon all that I have told 
you concerning moral principles throughout this whole 
course, — to prove that morality, the laws of life, will be 
permanent and enduring. It will abide forever, it will be 
universal, it will be self-executing: it cannot be escaped. 
It will cover human life, and it will depend simply upon 
itself, standing upon its own laws, a part of the eternal order 
of things. 

Next, this morality of ours will not be a fixed standard of 
action. It will be rather a movable and progressive ideal. 
Let me make this matter clear, if I can, so that you may 
see the importance of it. The principle underlying moral 
actions as I have told you before, is unchanging and 
eternal j that is, it is now, it must have been always, and 
it always must be in the future, the duty of every man to 



Morality and Religion in the Fitture. 185 

pursue such courses of conduct as shall minister to the wel- 
fare, the progress, and the happiness of men : that principle 
is eternal. But what particular thing I shall do under 
particular circumstances depends upon those circumstances 
themselves. So that morality will be a progressive thing. 
As man grows, as his view of the v/orld, of human life and 
human possibility, enlarges, so his moral ideal will grow, and 
be ever a light to lead him on, a constantly progressing 
approximation of his thought to the reality of things. So, 
I say, there will be no fixed standard of moralit}^ : there will 
be no time in the history of the world when a man can sit 
down, and in a book write out a set of maxims that shall be 
final to apply to all classes and conditions of men. He may 
write down a principle j but the application of it is a pro- 
gressive application, changing as human life changes, rising 
as human life rises: so that the moral life of man shall 
become higher, fuller, more comprehensive, sweeter, tenderer 
than it is to-day, ever keeping step with the progressive life 
of the human soul. 

Another thing will characterize the morality of the future. 
The trouble with the moral laws of the past and of the 
present lies in the fact that men do not appreciate, have 
only as yet partially learned, that it is really for their in- 
terest to keep them. There has been in the past, and there 
is wide-spread all over the world to-day, a sense of conflict 
between self-interest and right. And religion — lamentable 
it is — has done its full share in creating this sense of false 
antagonism ; for it has been telling men for ages, as Mr. 
Mallock is telling them to-day, that there is no reason in the 
nature of things why they should do right, but that they 
must obey some imaginary law which only tends to divert 
human thought from the reality of the eternal laws of right- 
eousness. But we may expect in the future that men will 
more and more completely learn that they cannot by any 
possibility make it pay to disregard the slightest of all these 
moral principles. Men will progressively learn more and 
more completely that, if they injure some one else under 



1 86 The Morals of Evolution. 

the fancied idea that they are benefiting themselves, they 
are only cheating their own souls, that they are only in- 
juring their own well-being and happiness. That is, man 
shall learn what God has made everlastingly true, that it is 
for the interest of every man to do right, to do it always; 
that it is for his well-being, that it is for his happiness, and 
that any advantage he takes of another in disregard of these 
moral laws shall prove itself a curse, a whip of scorpions 
to lash him until he comes again into accord with the ever- 
lasting nature of things. Men, I say, in the future may be 
expected to learn this. And, when they do learn it, see what 
a change ! This intellectual antagonism overthrown by the 
truer knowledge, then the power of human self-interest shall 
become attached to the car of God's eternal righteousness, 
and shall drag on, with a speed and success never before 
seen, the progress of the world's life, welfare, and happiness. 
This may be expected. It will be discovered one day to be 
literal truth, that no man — except through ignorance, through 
insanity, or through such a subjection to his passions that 
he is not a responsible being — has ever yet done wrong. 
And, if to-day you are capable of doing wrong, it means one 
of these. It means that you are either under the influence 
of your passions, or it means dense ignorance of the nature 
of things ; one of the two. It shall be seen, then, in the 
future — out of this springs our grandest hope of human 
progress in morals — that human interest lies in the direc- 
tion of righteousness forever, and that it cannot lie in any 
other direction. 

What may we expect of the form that the religious life of 
the world shall assume in the future? Remember, if you 
please, that, in discussing this part of our theme, I am only 
dealing with principles. The religious life of the future may 
be expected to express itself in outward institutions and rit- 
uals in various ways, just as it has in the past. That is, 
it is not a thing essential to religion that there should be 
cathedral or church or meeting-house ; that there should 
be ritual or public service ; that there should be this thing, 



Morality and Religion in the Futtire. 187 

that thing, or another thing. Only it is perfectly natural that 
these things should exist, because what a man is in himself 
it is natural that he should give external and material ex- 
pression to j and this expression, I say, we may expect to see 
varied according to the tastes, the feelings, the fancies, and 
the emotions of the world's inhabitants. 

But what, in its essential, underlying principles, will the 
religion of the future be ? I do not believe that it will be 
exclusively either one of the religions oE the present or 
the past. The religious life of man is something larger 
than any one religion. If it were not, it would have ex- 
pressed itself in that one, and in no other. We are not, I 
think, to look upon the religions of the world as one of 
them being absolutely true, and all the rest absolutely 
false, any more than we are to look upon a particular 
school of art as being absolutely true and all other schools 
absolutely false. The religions of the world, at least in 
the first instance, were the honest, devoted, earnest en- 
deavor of man to express the religious side of his life. 
All these religions may be grouped under three main 
classes. Whatever their manifestation, however perfect or 
imperfect, they fall naturally into one of these three. In 
the first place there is Paganism; that is, the worship of 
isolated, detached manifestations of the universe, whether of 
power or beauty, or what not. But these isolated mani- 
festations apart from the sum total of things is Paganism. 
Then there is the worship of humanity. The highest speci- 
men of this is Christianity ; for Christianity, if you will 
think of it, is simply the highest type of the worship of 
humanity, because God himself in Christianity is conceived 
of in the image of the ideal and perfect man. Then there is 
another form of religion that may be called scientific or cos- 
mic. The object of its wonder, its awe, its admiration, is the 
universe considered as a universe ; the unity, the mystery, 
the wonder, the power of this great being of whom I have 
spoken, out of whom we have come and on whom we depend. 
I believe that the religion of the future, the ideal religion, 



1 88 The Morals of Evohition. 

will combine in itself all these. It will take up into itself 
the admiration, the beauty, the might that manifested itself 
in Paganism. It will feel kindly toward art, and toward all 
the manifestations of this mysterious life of nature, whether 
under our feet or over our heads. It will take up into itself 
all that is good and beautiful and perfect in Christianity, the 
worship of the ideal moral, loving, tender man. It will take 
up into itself that larger unity, of which both Christianity and 
Paganism are only parts, — this cosmic worship of the uni- 
verse. 

The religion of the future, then, I believe, will combine all 
three. It will be the worship of the true and the beautiful 
and the good in one grand ideal. And it, in the next place, 
like morals, will be progressive. The great fault of the re- 
ligions of the past has been that they have anchored ; that 
they have conceived of themselves as complete and final 
revelations of God j and that the idea has grown up that 
it was impious to improve them. Thus for a while they 
have held back, until daring and apparently irreligious men 
have strode forward and compelled the religious progress of 
mankind. But when men remember, and remember perma- 
nently — not for a few minutes, to be forgotten after a little 
while — that God is infinite, that man is the finite creature 
of an hour, and that man's best and highest thought of God 
must be unspeakably below him, then, I say, man will see 
the folly of anchoring himself to even the grandest thought 
of the last century or of the present one, and will feel the 
necessity of keeping the ideal of God ever as a guiding light, 
an ideal to lead on the progress and elevation of the human 
race. So religion will take up into itself all of good and 
true and beautiful that the world shall progressively dis- 
cover. Instead of supposing that there was one final com- 
plete revelation in the past, the true religion of God will 
believe in a permanent revelation, a revelation forever un- 
folding, as the mind of man, in its discoveries and thoughts, 
is able to gain new and fresh and higher glimpses of the 
great life and power of things, that we call God. 



Morality and Religion in the Future. 1 89 

And then that other feature of religion that we in the rest- 
lessness of the present time are so much in danger of losing 
will come to the world, I believe, and give it rest. What do 
I mean? I mean that trust in this universe — whatever 
name you give it — that bases itself on the facts of the past 
history of the world, and is able to read with clearness the 
truth that God has always been "the power not ourselves 
that makes for righteousness"; and a faith based on this 
past experience that shall make him able to believe that the 
future will be only a more and more complete unfolding of 
the same power that works for righteousness. Thus man 
shall feel that he is not alone in the world, an orphan ; that 
he is not dealing with a power about which he knows noth- 
ing, is not dealing with a power that is antagonistic to him ; 
but will learn to believe, what I think is a truth that all past 
history witnesses and all knowledge to-day only confirms, 
that the universe is forever and of necessity on the side of 
right ; and that the man, in the midst of whatever difficulties, 
who stands for the right and the truth, may feel assured that 
the universe is at his back and that omnipotence is on his 
side. Law-keeping — and that means simply obedience to 
this God of whom I am speaking — always has meant, and 
always must mean, life and power. The only power that any 
living man has to-day, the power of his body, the power of 
conquest over nature, the power by which he chains the 
steam, by which he makes the lightning his errand boy, by 
which he makes the water-courses turn his mills, the power 
by which he makes the winds and the waves of ocean serve 
his purposes, — all the power man has simply comes from 
knowing so much about God, and obeying him. There is 
no other possibility of power. And when man learns to 
know God completely, and to obey him completely, he will 
wield the power of omnipotence like the omnipotent son of 
the omnipotent God. 

Such, then, I believe to be some of the principles under- 
lying the progress of religion in the future. Now for a word, 
in closing, as to the relations which morality and religion are 



IQO The Morals of Evolution, 

to sustain to each other. I told you in the second sermon of 
this series, in which we considered the moraUty and the reli- 
gion of the past, that they started independently of each 
other ; morality had its own root in human life and human 
experience \ religion started elsewhere ; how sometimes 
through the course of human history they had been in accord 
with each other, but that many, many times there had been 
religions that had nothing of morality about them, were either 
non-moral or immoral ; and that there had been schools of 
morality that utterly ignored the existence of religion. But 
it seems to me that this is not the ideal relation in which 
they should stand to each other ; and so I believe that in the 
future, in some grand sense, morality and religion shall be 
regarded as one, — each of them manifestations of a part 
of the life of the universe that we call God : morality, that 
side which turns its face toward humanity; religion, that 
side of human thought that looks out toward God. But, no 
longer being distinct, in the future they shall be one, and man 
shall feel that there can be no religion worthy of the name 
that does not take morality into itself as a part of it. And 
something more than that : the religion of the future shall 
not only make morality a part of itself, but the morality shall 
be the head and front and crown of the religion. For man 
shall more and more see that character and conduct are 
more important than anything else j and so his ideal of God 
shall be that of a moral being first and foremost, of a being 
who cares for righteousness, who upholds and executes his 
laws, of a being of love, of tenderness, and of pity, — a 
being: who holds in his heart all those divine human man- 
ifestations that sweeten and beautify and lift up our life. 
They shall be one, then, in the future, — only morality shall 
be the highest, noblest, most central part of religion. 

And one other thing. This religion, this belief to which I 
have referred, that the universe is on the side of law-keeping, 
that God is at the right hand of him who does right, that 
God is his friend and father and elder-brother, and that, in 
so far as he obeys law, — that is, does right, — he is a co- 



Morality and Religion in the Future. 191 

worker with God, — this faith shall be in man the mightiest 
of all possible motives for true and noble living. However 
much the tide and current of things at the time may seem to 
be against him, he shall know that any current that flows 
against the right is only an eddy, and that the great sweep 
and flow of the universe are the jther way. And so this relig- 
ious faith and trust shall be in his heart a stronghold of 
belief, and a mighty and all-controlling motive in thought and 
conduct. Thus man shall be dignified, — at the same time 
moral and religious, a brother of all his fellows, a child of 
God, — he shall be dignified to the office of co-worker in the 
present endeavor and struggle of both man and the universe, 
which shall at last culminate in that 

" One far-off divine event, 
To which the whole creation moves." 



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